The PERL CD Bookshelf - 6 Best selling Books on a CD-ROM

ISBN  1-56592-462-2   Price Approximately £40  UK
  6 books on a CD with Perl in a Nutshell as the main book
 

Book List

1  Perl in a Nutshell
2  Programming Perl, 2nd Edition
3  Perl Cookbook
4  Advanced Perl Programming
5  Learning Perl, 2nd Edition
6  Learning Perl on Win32 Systems
 

        Many Unix users have been able to use Perl for many years and more recently the Win32 people have discovered that they can read a book as well.   It would seem that not many of them have that particular talent though.    Although Perl 5.6 is now mostly the one that is used for most things this single volume and a CD with six books on it is probably the best thing to get hold of if you want to know more about Perl.  It is a vast subject and not the kind of thing that you could learn on a burger stand at midnight.

Review

    I would like to have been more thorough with this particular review but there's so much on the CD and in the book that comes with it that it's probably best to get hold of a copy yourself .  As with all O'Reilly books the entire concept is well thought out from beginning to end.  You only have to mention the name O'Reilly and everyone understands what it means :-)

Perl in a Nutshell is the paper version of the  book.  It does give quite a few things that are difficult to find anywhere else.  Even if you download the docs from CPAN it's not always the case that everything that you need is there.  Some help from an O'Reilly book is useful.

Moving through the CD for the first time you can find a bewildering amount of info.  It's not easy to work out which part of the disk to view first.  A few days of careful searching reveals more and the stuff that you want can be found.  The last three volumes on the disk are probably the most useful out of the set.

The bible is not as comprehensive a document on it's own subject of religion as the Perl CD Bookshelf really is when it comes to Perl and programming methods.  In fact, there are Perl programmers I have met who are more like priests than the real thing.

Colophon

"The animal featured on the cover of Perl in a Nutshell is a camel (one hump dromedary).  Camels are large ruminant mammals, weighing between 1000 and 1600 pounds and standing six to seven feet tall at the shoulders.  They are well known for their use as draft and saddle animals in the desert regions, especially of Africa and Asia.  Camels can go for days without water.  If food is scarce, they will eat anything, even their owner's tent.  Camels live up to 50 years."
 

Review by  Richard Ibbotson