Professional
Perl Programming
Peter Wainright
with a few others Wrox Press £45.99
Aldo Calpini,
Arthur Corliss, Simon Cozens, Juan Julian Mereleo Guervos,
Chris Nandor,
Aalhad Saraf
26 Chapters and 8 Appendices in 1214 Pages.
Contents
Chapters
1 Introduction
2 Basic Concepts
3 Scalars
4 Operators
5 Beyond Scalars - More Data Types
6 Structure, Flow and Control
7 Subroutines
8 Scope and Visibility
9 Using Modules
10 Inside Modules and Packages
11 Regular Expressions
12 Input and Output with Filehandles
13 Manipulating Files and Directories
14 Command Line and Shell Interaction
15 Terminal Input and Output
16 Warnings and Errors
17 Debugging
18 Text Processing and Document Generation
19 Object Orientated Perl
20 Inside Perl
21 Integrating Perl with Other Programming Languages
22 Creating and Managing Processes
23 Networking with Perl
24 Writing Portable Perl
25 Unicode
26 Locale and Internationalisation
Appendices
A Command Line Options
B Special Variables
C Function Reference
D Regular Expressions
E Standard Pragmatic Modules
F Standard Functional Modules
G Perl Resources
H Support, Errata and p2p.wrox.com
index
Synopsis
Professional Perl Programming is aimed at the experienced programmer and also the newcomer to Perl. Those of us who have met Peter Wainright and Simon Cozens will know that there isn't much point in questioning their capabilities as programmers. The other people who helped to put this book together are also very much the kind of people who don't make mistakes.
Review
The entire book does have a logical structure and shows a practical approach to programming. This is something that most Wrox books set out to do and most times they achieve it. As we all know Perl is supported on most platforms. If you know about Perl and can understand the code then anything is possible. One of the other nice features of Perl is that the software comes with a lot of documentation that is easy to read and understand. It's also become a language that is feature rich.
The ins and outs of Perl programming are certainly covered in this book. There is a feeling of thoroughness and depth throughout that won't leave too many questions to ask of Perl people on the internet. The introduction is a little bit like the Beginning Perl book that Wrox previously released and the Basic Concepts section will give some useful hints that may not be all that obvious. It's at the third chapter that things begin to get heavy with the section on scalars and the fact that scalars can be divided into three groups which are numbers, strings and references. Operators are the stuff of chapter four where more data types are introduced and demonstrated. The basic syntax of the language is covered by structure, flow and control. This is mostly comprehensive although probably a bit brief for someone who is a Perl programmer already.
The rest
of the book goes into all of the parts of Perl that might interest you
just now. Sections on networking Perl and Object Oriented Perl are
particularly interesting. The chapter on debugging isn't the kind
of thing that I've been able to get hold of easily from elsewhere.
The final bits at the end which are the appendices are always the kind
of thing that finish off the Wrox programming books and also put the cherries
on to a well made cake that has been prepared by many cooks who know how
to bake. Throughout the book there are many examples of code
in the format that Wrox use for all of their books. An example below.......
|
#!/usr/bin/perl #gensym.pl use warnings; use strict; use Symbol; my $fh = gensym;
|
If you are
at the stage where you feel that you would like to know more about Perl
programming methods then you should consider getting hold of Professional
Perl Programming. If you feel that you might need a bit less then
Beginning Perl Programming is the book that you should have a look at.
Review by Richard Ibbotson
