Review: Advanced Perl Programming

Pater has given us a write up on the famous panther book, Advanced Perl Programming. So, if you just can't get enough Perl, and who can, check it out. Besides, Slashdot is programmed in Perl, and we all love Slashdot, right? Riiigght.

REVIEW: Advanced Perl Programming by Sriram Srinivasan (O'Reilly & Associates)

Reviewed by Pater.

Nutshell Review: More in-depth than Programming Perl, this book shows how powerful Perl can be whether designing solutions for the enterprise, or just trying to automate difficult tasks on your own system.

Rating: 7/10

What's Good?

After getting my feet wet programming in Perl (and reading the Camel Book) I wanted more, and a quick paging through this book showed me windows interfaces, networking calls, and more. When reading the book, I found some of the same topics addressed in Programming Perl, but the topics covered in both books are quite possibly the toughest Perl concepts to master. After reading the section on object orientation, I finally felt comfortable enough to due object-oriented programming in Perl. Advanced Perl Programming is, at it's very worst, a quick tour of several modules available for Perl. The book spends a considerable amount of time on Perl/Tk, with an appendix dedicated to Perl/Tk as well.

These sections alone justified the cost of the book to me, but it also contains instructions on embedding Perl into C and using C within Perl. The book also takes time out to compare and contrast Perl with other langauges. This helps those who may be making a transition to Perl from C/C++, Java, or Python. All in all, this book is a good reference for the power Perl programmer.

What's Bad?

One major downside is that many modules upon which Advanced Perl Programming is written are not part of the standard Perl distribution. Granted, most of the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) modules are accepted as "the ones to use," but they are not guaranteed to be on every machine that has Perl. My other biggest irritation is that often an extremely powerful module would recieve little attention, and the book acts as one giant pointer to CPAN. However, this isn't much of a problem to anyone with good internet access.

Why should I buy this book?

If you are a Perl programmer who wants to use Perl to it's fullest, this book is definitely for you. I don't know of a more advanced book on Perl that covers the same material. Advanced Perl Programming is not a book for the Perl hacker (no fancy one-liners here), but more of a guide to help an application developer get the most out of Perl.

So, if you'd like to pick this up, check out Amazon. Also, O'Reilly is doing a Linux survey about their books. Head over there and help them out.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Data References and Anonymous Storage
2. Implementing Complex Data Structures
3. Typeglobs and Symbol Tables
4. Subroutine References and Closures
5. Eval
6. Modules
7. Object-Oriented Programming
8. Object Orientation: The Next Few Steps
9. Tie
10. Persistence
11. Implementing Object Persistence
12. Networking with Sockets
13. Networking: Implementing RPC
14. User Interfaces with Tk
15. GUI Example: Tetris
16. GUI Example: Man Page Viewer
17. Template-Driven Code Generation
18. Extending Perl: A First Course
19. Embedding Perl: The Easy Way
20. Perl Internals

Appendix A: Tk Widget Reference
Appendix B: Syntax Summary