O'Reilly Perl Algorithm Book in August

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that O'Reilly is going to be shipping a new Perl Algorithms book By Jon Orwant, Jarkko Hietaniemi & John Macdonald. Its not due until August (why does that feel like years?), but I'm already stoked. And I'm cranky that I missed Larry Walls speech at LWCE.

Qmail

[Micah]

Off topic slightly, but I thought they had a Qmail book in the pipeline. Where is it????

I want it!!!

[Zachary Kessin]

Long wait.

--Zachary Kessin

Cover

[slim]

Hrm, what books get the extinct cover animals?

"Mastering Scientific Programming with FORTRAN", also known as "The Dodo Book"...
--

Larry Wall's session at LinuxWorld Conf

[mattdm]

Wow, he is so cool. Best part of the whole conference, except maybe Linus's keynote.

--

Cover

[fizbin]

Since when did O'Reilly confine themselves to endangered species?

I'm remembering the "Making TeX work" book which has on the cover a European Garden Spider - hardly an endangered species.

I thought that O'Reilly's animals were limited by the set of 19th century wood engravings that they were using as picture sources, though maybe they've moved away from that set.

I suppose I should also mention that you can see the cover by following the link posted in the top article. It appears to be a grey wolf.

Drool

[fizbin]

Assuming that this book stil contains all of these, I'd buy it just for the statistics algorithms (I have managed to "misplace" my undergrad stats book).

Occasionally it's useful for a TA to be able to show that slight differences in average homework grades by gender aren't statistically significant.

Perl S&M

[msuzio]

Give it up. I'm *so* sick and tired of people who don't know how to actually program in Perl ragging on it. I program daily in it... real programs, of actual largish size (well over 20,000 lines of code in the entire system of a typical app I just checked). It works like a charm. It provides object-orientation, more available libraries than you can shake a stick at, and the ability to program outside the box when I need to.
Oh, and I don't have to worry about an extra space screwing up my loop constructs :-P

Perl is a real programming language. It not only gets the job done for teeny sysadmin jobs, it cranks pretty well on "real apps".

(Not to slight Dylan, or Python, or Java... they might be cool, too... just not attractive to me at the moment)

Perl S&M

[msuzio]

Once again, I already said, I write Perl apps every day. It works. You cannot prove to me it doesn't work, and it's not maintainable, because (duh), for me and my company, *it is*.

We have great programmers, we all know how to avoid doing stupid stuff, and we write really good code.

The fact that Perl is great for one-off scripts doesn't make it unusable for larger projects at all. Maybe it doesn't suit everyone. Fine, use a language that works for you. But don't be foolish enough to make unjustified claims... we usually call that FUD. :-)

Regex Engines

[AMK]

Actually, the PCRE library [freshmeat.net] supports Perl 5.004's regexes quite nicely in a compact little library. Some Perl 5.005 features such as (?>...) are also implemented, but others, such as embedding Perl code, obviously aren't possible.

The PCRE code could use some more optimization, but on the other hand, at least its code is relatively easy to read. There's also the regex engine inside Mozilla's JavaScript implementation [mozilla.org], which I know little about.

Already ordered my copy

[andya]

What would we do without O'Reilly

Book Long Due

[Cassius]

O'Reilly announced this nearly six months ago - I preordered a copy with the notion that it would be arriving soon after. I guess I was wrong. I can only suspect a major rewrite of some section was required - it is not like O'Reilly to take orders on a book almost a year before it is to be released.

Book Long Due

[ghira]

Yep, I ordered this months ago too.

I was wondering what had happened.

Don't sweat it.

[dillon_rinker]

Private Sub cmdButton1_Click()
If strInsult="glorified data entry clerk" Then
txtBox1="Hey! Stop insulting me!"
Else
txtBox1="Quit picking on me!"
EndIf
End Sub

Algorithms and languages

[dillon_rinker]

My favorite programming lanauge is pseudocode.

Can you recommend a good compiler for that?

I'll bet you speak Esperanto, too.

Perl S&M

[dillon_rinker]

om a language design standpoint, Perl is not a pretty language at all.

Neither is English.

Don't sweat it.

[SeanNi]

Does this mean I can't continue taking the piss out of perl programmers?

I am actually going to have to give them some respect?

Will I have to stop calling them a bunch of glorified data entry clerks...?


Yep...

...but then again, with all the new users Linux is getting from "going mainstream", there are sure to be at least a couple of VB lusers migrating from Windows who are worth your disrespect.

Of course, calling them "a bunch of glorified data entry clerks" is pretty high praise...

(...for them).
--
- Sean

Shocking

[Tomato Soup]

What a ridiculous comment. Of course every computable function can be written in Perl. Pretty much any C code can be translated directly into Perl, and this is the way a lot of horrible Perl gets written.

Here's why a Perl algorithm book is worthwhile:

Perl's builtin data structures have features that can be used to great effect in algorithms, particularly hashes. For instance, here's a classic example of an algorithm to remove duplicates from a list, or return the union of two lists:

sub unique {
my %temp = map {$_,1} @_;
return keys %temp;
}

Or, more succinctly:

sub unique {
return keys %{{ map {$_,1} @_ }};
}

This is way different from the algorithm a transplanted C programmer would use. Things that are appropriate in one language aren't necessarily appropriate in another.