VBScript Books

A language reference book that's a page-turner? Yes, it can happen, and Hall and Schwartz have done it. At least one right way to almost anything in Perl that you might want to do, and then some. Clear, concise, no-nonsense guidance and explanations. What else can I say -- I wish I had a book like this for C!

this book is "MUST HAVE" Perl book!
It gives you great idea to simply your code and algorithm.

I'm fairly new to Perl (but not to programming) and this book is great. I really like the format of the code examples, and there's a lot of wisdom here on writing good, idiomatic Perl.

This book shows you some efficient and interesting ways of using Perl. It is very informative and I often use it when I want to see if there is a better way of doing something.

This is a good book for getting a handle on intermediate level Perl and its idiomatic uses, arranged as a series of 60 'items' -- the debt to Effective C++ is obvious. This is not a tutorial on Perl, you should at least be at the level of The Llama and ideally be somewhat acquainted with the material covered in The Alpaca, too. Although similar ground is covered in this book to the latter, I would treat this book as a way to shore up your previous knowledge, rather than learning it for the first time.

The content holds up surprisingly well for 1997. The opening chapters cover a lot of the oddities and gotchas of life with Perl, such as slicing, the various connotations of undef, a persuasive defence of $_ and where + is necessary to disambiguate. The final 'miscellany' chapter also contains useful information in a similar vein. And this also appears to be one of the first books to detail the now famous Schwartzian transform and the Orcish manoeuvre for sorting, so it has a certain historical appeal.

Equally, the chapters on debugging, references, regular expressions and object oriented programming are also pretty good. It's just that there are now several other books that cover these topics. If you only want one book in this style, Perl Best Practices bestrides the field like a colossus, being more comprehensive, and better written. Not that there's anything wrong with the writing here, it's never boring as such, but it does feel flat.

Nonetheless, Effective Perl Programming does the job it sets out to do fairly well, and I find you can never have too much help in explaining the nooks and crannies of idiomatic Perl, so this is still worth getting hold of, particularly because you can find it at an extremely reasonable price.

This man makes a promise of a written format that can be followed. The writtng is NOT CLEAR and leaves much to the readers imagination of to what exactly the format should be. There is no CD so that you can see how the step by step process works. He names his files but does not show the real differences between how he is set up and how you can set up to fit your needs. I waisted my money. He claims in the book there is support which at best is terrible.

The worst book I have ever bought on coding. If I were you try another writter.

This is a good book. It teaches many useful techniques and how lots of "how to" ideas. However, the faux site that is created isn't goal oriented which left me feeling like the book was just a collection of random things to do. It seemed disorganized at times when you would or wouldn't create another page from scratch vs. revamping one you had already made. It was not always clear why you would be better to take one approach vs. the other. Setting up the localhost environment was somewhat confusing, though not too bad.

I will definitely use it frequently. Good information, good book, good deal.

This book is written very clearly and is really easy to follow. I've learned a lot of other really useful stuff than just the PHP content, things that I now realise I should have been taught by the official Dreamweaver 8 book, but weren't. The PHP content for which I bought this book is fantastic - much better than another generic PHP/MySQL I have read, as this is tailored to the Dreamweaver 8 environment which takes a lot of the guessing out of the equation. This book is written by and for people who use Dreamweaver 8 in a practical situation. I'm still less than half way through my book and already feel like I've learned much more than I expected. Highly recommended. I'll be checking out Mr Powers' other books when I finish this one. Thanks David Powers, you're a genius!

This is a very good book for learning PHP, and surprisingly, most of the examples work right out of the book as he's written them, which seems rare for a programming book these days. The projects that he has you complete are highly relevant to what you'd actually be doing with PHP, and that makes it even better.

The only trouble I had with this book was that he sure packed a lot of information into each chapter, and he didn't use the sidebars as much as I would have hoped. It's easy enough to follow along with the examples the first time, but if you want to go back again and figure out how he programmed a small detail, you'll never find it unless you reread the whole chapter again. All it would have taken was a few little bullets here and there in the margins to point out some of the off-topic stuff that was going on in the examples, and the book would be much more functional as a reference. As it stands, I probably will have to get a whole new book for that purpose.

Also, the support on this book is phenomenal. I missed a small detail in Chapter 6 that caused my script to fail, and when I posted on the book's message board, I had a reply from the author in less than a day. That's a really cool added bonus.

I am a frontpage user that has set up static pages in a web site. I needed to move from static pages to dynamic pages using a database. I couldn't use PHP with FrontPage so I switched to Dreamweaver and needed a book that covered both dynamic pages and Dreamwaver. This book walked me through setting up the environment to have Dreamweaver work with Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin. I am completely non-technical so these areas were beyond my comfort zone but the book walked me through it very successfully. It then took me through CSS styles, setting up an online feedback form, setting up my first database and tying it into Dreamweaver. It also showed how to insert, delete and maintain records in order to keep the database up to date. This was an excellent book for a non-techie as it didn't take any knowledge for granted.

A good reference to the PERL language.

As opposed to the O'Reilly publications, this book does not assume as much reading between the lines as what is written at times in those.

So, this may be useful for people to clarify what is being talked about in entries there, or just as a more clear starting point to begin with for the areas of PERL programming that it covers.

This book is a great reference if you just want to quickly look up a syntax. The index is very good and makes it easy to find answers to problems quickly, and it almost always beats trolling through google search results! While it would not be useful as the only text for beginners, I think it would make a good supplemental text. It also might be a good choice for people who already have experience in other languages, and are switching to perl, or intermediate perl programmers who cannot remember where every comma and semicolon should go!

I am extremely impressed by this merchant. The shipping was on time and the book was in great condition

As a new programmer and new Perl programmer this is an invaluable reference. For the ambitious newbie this book can serve as a great starter guide to the Perl language. As a reference and supplement to another beginner book, this book really soars.

I was able to quickly expand my understanding of Perl and started writing real perl programs (albeit very simple ones as a beginning perl programmer) by using this book. You'll become well versed in Perl using this as your constant guide.

When a programming reference can be distilled is such a highly useful and pragmatic way, you've got to add it to your library. Brilliant job on this one.

I highly recommend this work and I'm confident you won't leave home without it. Or perhaps you'll buy one for home and work. I also highly recommend 'Perl Power' by John Flynt and 'Beginning Perl, Second Edition' by James Lee (Apress) as companion beginner books to this one.

This is a great reference book for perl. It doesn't try to teach the reader perl, which after you already know it is really nice. This is more like a collection of all the perlmod/man pages put together in an organized manner. I reference this book all the time for different syntax structures and many other reasons.

This book provided me the needed information to be able to use JQuery practically and efficiently.

I have committed myself to using jquery exclusively for my javascript applications but not much is written about it so it is difficult to solve problems. This book answered a lot of my questions and cleared up many difficulties. I use it as a reference whenever I am stuck. Thank you for writing it.

This is a really nice book on jquery. I've been using jQuery on a few projects, but this really helped point me to several things I could be doing better. All too often you find yourself following a tutorial blindly, without full understanding. This book set a few of my "tutorial assumptions" straight.

I only wish it had a little more meat to it. I think it's just a matter of a few things I'd hoped to find not being there though. Definitely suggest this book if you're serious about messing with jQuery in a real project.

reading this book will assist you when working with jquery. it is very well written. short and to the point. worth buying

I really have tattered the edges of this book. Normally, I would read a technical book like this, extract all of the information I needed, and then set it back on the book shelf. Not with jQuery in Action! I bring it to work, and then I take it back home in the evening. It is an outstanding book for any programmer who is really serious about keeping all of the user events at the browser level; instead of always going back to the server for something. This book has raised my level of awareness of all of the DOM-level programming available with the use of simple jQuery scripting. Thanks Bear and Yehuda for all of your hard work. Please keep on writing and authoring!!

This book does for Ruby what Kernighan & Ritchie's "The C Programming Language" did for C. It provides a concise, accessible introduction to the Ruby programming language.

Starting out with a tour of Ruby, you are then taken on a deeper dive into chapters on "Structure and Execution", "Datatypes and Objects", "Expressions and Operators", and "Statements and Control Structures". Some of the real power of Ruby is revealed in chapters on "Methods, Procs, Lambdas, and Closures", "Classes and Modules", and "Reflection and Metaprogramming".

The book closes with chapters on "The Ruby Platform" and "The Ruby Environment". The chapter on the Ruby Platform is like a condensed API guide to Ruby's core library. The chapter on the Ruby Environment will help you navigate through the Ruby interpreter's command-line arguments and environment variables as well as a grab-bag of extra Ruby topics that were not covered earlier in the book.

The book is well organized and easy to read. Each chapter is peppered with code samples. If you are serious about learning Ruby, get this book! It sits on my bookshelf, next to a copy of the Pickaxe book and The Ruby Way. Bonus: each chapter of the book starts with a work of art by why the lucky stiff!

The Ruby Programming Language is my new favorite Ruby book. I personally think it is a better text than the famous "Pickaxe" book. While the Pickaxe has a great class/module reference (it's over half of the book, after all), the actual explanations of how Ruby works in The Ruby Programming Language are clearer and go into much more depth. Most importantly for me, The Ruby Programming Language covers some of the more complicated topics, such as metaprogramming, with MUCH more depth. From the Pickaxe alone I had trouble understanding how some of these Ruby features worked. But with this new book, it's much clearer.

If you want the defacto Ruby book, this is it.

This book is quite simply one of the finest software development books ever written. The style, the length, the scope, and the structure are all absolutely perfect. The balance creates a reading experience that seemingly opens a channel to your brain and feeds the information in.

Flanagan is a master author of technical books, especially languages. His JavaScript book is equally well done. Matsumoto's unique technical mastery here leaves no stone unturned. And even the artwork by "why the lucky stiff" added a fun element that just rounded out the book as the best in its class.

If I could forget the whole thing, just so I could read it again, I would. It is that good.

Really found this to be an excellent guide to the Ruby programming language. This is definitely not just the API rehashed in print.

The difference in the style of this book and some others, in my opinion, is the difference between a map and a travel guide. A map may show you what and where things are, and may even be useful for figuring out how to go between locations, a travel guide will often include maps plus the inside scoop on what is interesting.

This book is similar. The writing style is like having an expert sit down and explain to you the various facets of the language, how to use them, points that are notable, etc. And all of this content is within a reasonable 400 pages.

Highly recommended.

I wish every book about a programming language was written like this one:

First, it is fairly compact and doesn't waste space (and your time) explaining to you what is a byte or a register, like some 800 page "volumes about everything" do. It correctly assumes that the reader is a programmer and explains the language, not the programming.

Second, it covers Ruby in depth. Read this book and you'll easily understand the most craziest Ruby code examples that could be found inside of Rails and other popular libraries. Moreover, I've found a few tricks in the book that I don't believe I saw in the wild.

And finally, author's language is very clean, free of buzzwords and needless repetitions. As always with O'Reilly books, this one is also very neatly structured and makes an excellent reference book.

Buy it.

The problem I've seen with technical books is that either they are in tutorial/textbook format which includes lessons and then review questions at the end of each chapter, or they are purely reference type books ideal for looking up things on occasion and not really good for a beginner to learn the subject matter. This book was the first one I felt that was ideal in both textbook form as well as a reference book for looking things up.

The chapters were basic enough for the beginner to grasp the material, and the lessons were rife with hands-on examples which I thought was the best part. I like to try things out as I go through the lessons and so the material was very useful for me.

The printing of the material was interesting and draws the reader into the subject, important notes and pitfalls are highlighted between the text to avoid the paragraphs from becoming too long and drawn out. The writer's diction is sometimes humorous to avoid the reader from losing interest.

The book is kind of bulky and thick so as a consequence of regular use, the glue based binding gave way somewhere in the middle of the book so when I open it, the first half of the book is attched merely by a shred to the second half, so I have to be careful now when I lookup things in it. I wouldn't trade this book for anything.

I have never taken any instructional classes on Perl scripting and can safely say that everything I know about Perl scripting I've learned from this book. That being said I am able to write fairly sophisticated perl scripts and have the ability to understand fairly obfuscated perl code without difficulty. I use perl as a very strong and useful tool in my day to day tasks for scripting and text processing needs and I often dazzle and amaze my colleagues at work with the tricks I'm able to pull off by using perl scripting and I owe it all to this book.

In short, I give two enthusiastic thumbs up for this book and the 5 star rating that I gave this book was merely due to the amazon limitation on the number of stars you can give in your review.

I started learning Perl two years ago. I first browsed libraries, free tutorials, news groups etc... It was nice for the beginning but soon enough I understood that's not the way :)

I started looking around for good Perl books and somehow got to this one. I think I can clearly say, that this book did the work. Teached me Perl from the ground up. I'm now planning on buying "MySQL and mSQL" to start working with databases. I also consider buying "Mastering Algorithms With Perl" & "Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software".

Anyway, if you want to start learning Perl, buy this book. I also use it as a reference.

The book is a good and detailed tutorial for all novices who want to learn Perl. No hit around the bush stuff and the chapters were well thought of. Credit should be given to the author and the publishing group for these helpful information. The Source codes on the CD-Rom comes handy when when you want to test out the sample codes in the book. The questions at the end of each chapter is a good revision after scanning the chapter. I strongly recommend those who want to learn Perl to get a copy of this book as their first book.

After the Camel book, of course. This book is very well paced with well thought out examples. I needed it as a refresher last year, and now use it as a reference.

The only down side is that the Web Based interactive segment is no longer available. not a big deal since it's the same quizes as in the book, but there was a gee-whiz, isn't it fun factor to have it available online.

This book covers everything from soup to nuts. It starts the learner off slowly with the basic perl syntax and then smoothly moves into subroutines, OOP, DBI modules, Security, etc. all with the same interesting and amusing style.

I don't know if it's mentioned in the Editorial review, but the author is the Editor of The Perl Journal (www.tpj.com) which is a magazine devoted to the perl programming language. So Jon Orwant *knows* his topic.

I've read and use most of the Perl books out on the market today, but none comes close to getting you going well with Perl as does Jon Orwant's book. I still use it as a reference today, but it is the best any money can buy for learning Perl. I'm back buying another copy because I loaned mine to a friend and I miss it so much that I want to make sure I'll always have a copy handy. My old copy is so well worn that a fresh copy is enticing also. As for extras in the book: the quizzes are great for testing your understanding, and someone has done a great job at proofreading this book -- I don't know whether that person is at the Waite Group or is Jon himself, but I know that anytime I have questioned an answer, or a script, or anything in the book I have always found the book to be accurate on closer inspection. It is very much like the Camel Book in being authoritative -- what Jon says is Perl Gospel Truth - if I had to pick two Perl books, I'd pick this one for learning and the Camel Book for ultimate reference. Jon's book should be rated a 5 and a half star - this is the best that it ever gets!

Like my title of the review reads, if you have computer science background and just starting with PERL, this is the book for you. It teaches PERL the way computer science people are taught programming languages like C, FORTRAN etc. Starts with basics and proceeds in systematic and logical way. It is an easy read and will get you up and running in less than 2 days.

I know several programming languages and wanted to use Perl on my website. Within days I was able to take existing scripts and modify them to use on my site. I was able to generate several program to help maintain the site within weeks. Great book!

This is the first and from what I found "ONLY" book for a novice. I have read numerous titles on Perl and was always left with basic questions. If you want to understand Perl, read this book.

I read Beginning Perl, 2nd Ed (BP2E) to gain some familiarity with Perl 5. I do not plan to really write anything in Perl, but I find myself using other people's code quite a bit! In those situations I would like to know how the code works. I also enjoy being able to make small changes if the code does not work as expected. Perl is basically everywhere, so it pays to understand it to some degree.

James Lee's book is excellent from start to finish. I found his explanations very clear and his writing style lively. He covered just about everything I hoped to read in a book of roughly 400 pages. The book is ideal for the self-educated since it contains exercises with answers in the back. I personally enjoyed learning more about regular expressions in Ch 7, since PCRE is an important part of several network security tools.

It is easy to take a good programming book for granted. I have started and stopped reading several other books written to teach programming because their style is terrible and the assumptions they make confuse the beginner. BP2E is always conscious of what the reader has already seen. The author makes it clear when a briefly mentioned topic will be more thoroughly explained later in the book. Plenty of technical authors could learn from this example.

Even if you plan to read the author's new book -- Beginning Perl 6 (or BP3E) -- you may want to read BP2E. Perl 5 will be with us for many more years, so it pays to understand the material in BP2E. (It's possible that BP3E could demonstrate Perl 5 and 6 syntax, but I doubt it.)

Beginning Perl is a great introduction and resource. It does assume the reader has some basic prior programming experience, but either way it is very logical and easy to follow. The book is well-organized so that you can easily find what you need. There are tips and shortcuts strategically placed throughout the book to help you along the way.

I bought this book very recently, having no prior experience with Perl. I had seen a couple of scripts that other people had written, but since I have minimal programming experience I could only somewhat figure out what they were intended for.

I read the first chapter of Beginning Perl (11 pages), and read bits and pieces of the second chapter (37 pages). Then I began writing my first Perl scripts, using the book primarily for reference. It makes a great reference tool because the index is very thorough and the examples are easy to understand without necessarily reading the entire book in order. About 3 hours ago I couldn't have told you what a subroutine was or how to create a hash, but now I have completed my first interactive program using subroutines, hashes, various types of loops, error-checking, etc. That would have taken me weeks to learn if I had not discovered this book.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning Perl.

Very good resource, it is a very good book and I highly recommend it. It is designed for people who know web programming but are want to learn Ajax, and it has helped me.

This will not be the last thing you want to read about Ajax, but it should be the first. Great introduction: clearly written, easy to follow sample code, and thankfully concise.

The author has put up a supporting web site. There's a forum and the author responds to questions. He has also provided all the sample code on the site. You can also copy and paste the SQL statements to create the database, tables, and insert the sample data.

I must admit I was disappointed when I first opened this book. Large fonts, half-empty pages, I thought they just wanted to extend 20-30 page text to 140+ and make money.
I was wrong, I mistakenly thought that this was going to be like PHP6 & MySql5 from the same author. That book is a heavy one with 600+ pages where author goes into every single detail.

However, this book is 100% practical guide. It's like Larry is teaching you a lesson how to implement that darn Javascript/Ajax that you tried but couldn't and explains to you everything he does! Clean, simple and elegant.
So for 13-14$ you can't ask for more and definitely is worth it!
I like his attitude, his style and he REALLY *knows how*!

very concise yet descriptive illustrations for creating a project with AJAX. Of course it is not a Bible for this technology, but a very very handy book which gived the basic idea.

The book jacket lists it as a beginner level book. It says: "Familiarity with HTML, JavaScript, PHP and CSS would be helpful but is not required." It's true that the project doesn't involve anything terribly complicated in any of these areas. Still, if ALL of these are unfamiliar to you, I'd guess it would be quite difficult to follow what is going on simply because there are so many components interacting. (Actually there are a few more involved as well: MySQL, SQL and XML).

Every step of the project is explained at a level that assumes you might not have seen that type of code before. But the exact syntax of each line of code isn't always explained so you may have to follow up with more reading and research if you want to adapt what you've learned to your own project later.

Several things I thought were particularly good about this book. One: given that browsers do a good part of the processing with AJAX through JavaScript, and given that you can't count on consistent behavior across browsers--or even on JavaScript being enabled, I was pleased to find that the project was designed to create a non-AJAX version first and then to add the AJAX layer on top of that.

Two: there was a good amount of error-checking built in to the application even though it is a fairly simple one. That's something as a not-so-proficient programmer I often find myself overlooking.

And three: tips on debugging in PHP and in JavaScript are included. Although they are pretty basic tips, if you are a beginner, they will be helpful.

I'd say this book can give you as much for your investment of time as many a day-long workshop would and at much lower cost.

This is a great book to start with for those who want to learn JavaScript. It has excellent discussion of the basics of the language with plenty of examples to follow along with. Most of the example scripts are small and basic in nature. But, they can still make useful additions to any website that might need image rollovers, cookies or pop-up windows. In the later chapters there are a few larger and slightly more complicated scripts like an image slide show. The book also has thorough coverage of basic programming concepts like variables, arrays, loops and such. Therefore, any prior programming or scripting knowledge is not an absolute requirement. All the code in this book worked smoothly with errors found only in the HTML code. The minor, and somewhat strange, errors in the HTML code really didn't create any problems. The multiple choice final exam did provide a descent review of the material at the end of the book. However, I would have preferred answers with a little explanation rather than just the correct letter.

The only issue I had with this book is the final chapters. I did expect a little more exposure to advanced scripts and concepts. There were only a few examples and most were scripts from dynamicdrive.com with little or no discussion of new concepts. Much of the final two chapters were just descriptions with URL's of sophisticated scripts that can be downloaded from Dynamic Drive. This was a bit disappointing since most designers/developers probably know how to find and install scripts from the many code libraries on the web.

Overall, JavaScript Demystified is a great book for a true beginner with no prior experience with scripting or programming. This is not the best book for those who just want to copy scripts or who are expecting advanced topics. This is a book for those who want to actually learn JavaScript. I definitely would look forward to a new book by the same author in the same format that covers advanced JavaScript.

I felt that this book was very good for beginners as well as a good reference for those that have a strong background in html and JavaScript.

I recently attended a JavaScript course where the instruct have a difficult time explaining JavaScript in clear Englishing. I'm not a programmer, so I needed someone to explain this in simple English. This book make JavaScript clear enough so that I passed the course.

Clear and concise, done with not one wit of 'speaking down' to you, and the explanations are straightforward. The material is introduced a piece at a time, and with reasonable review questions that are surprisingly thorough.
I would suggest it to anyone who wants a good reference to JavaScript as well. Buy it you won't be disappointed.

I you ever wondered how the professional web page developers dress up their web pages, then take a look at this book. Every trick that I've seen on commercial web pages are revealed in this book. I easily copied code from the book into my web pages and made mine work like a pro web page. Good book.

Perl is my workhorse language. I've written more Perl code, both personally and professionally, than any other language I've learned. Whenever I receive a new project, I immediately think of how I would accomplish it quickly in Perl. I've also been a fan of O'Reilly's "Hacks" series of books. When I heard of the marriage of Perl and O'Reilly's "Hacks" series in the book Perl Hacks, I knew I had to pick up a copy. It was a match made in heaven. The nature of Perl for terse, yet powerful constructs, and the hackish nature of the "Hacks" series makes for one of my favorite books in this series. The collection of articles in Perl Hacks are great for putting more productivity into your programming experience.

Those of you not familiar with O'Reilly's "Hacks" Series may need an introduction. The "Hacks" Series is an ever-growing set of books with focused attention on a particular topic, like Astronomy, Mental Improvement, or even Halo 2. The books are generally short, and contain article-length "hacks" of varying difficulty, noted by a thermometer next to the hack number and description. These "hacks" fall into several categories; the non-obvious solution to a problem, the performance improvement, and the "gee, I didn't know it could do that" oddity. What makes this series special compared with other books is the willingness to "void the warranty" on a particular product, and get straight to the internals, whether they lay in hardware or software. If something can be made better by opening the covers, or twiddling with the program layout, then its eligible for inclusion in these books. The series lends itself to a wide range of topics, and the format is great for a quick read, or for (my favorite) just randomly opening the book and reading what's there.

Perl Hacks is not a book that you'd find yourself reading straight through (although you do want to make sure you visit every hack in the book at least once). The book is divided into nine chapters: Productivity Hacks, User Interaction, Data Munging, Working with Modules, Object Hacks, Debugging, Developer Tricks, Know Thy Code, and Expand Your Perl Foo. There are 101 hacks in this book, ranging from the simple (Reading files backward, or managing your module paths) to the truly perverse (Replacing bad code without touching it by substituting the system-wide exit call with your own[...]. Each hack title is listed in the table of contents, with both the page number and the hack number. Each hack contains a graphic of a thermometer next to the number to show the relative difficulty of the hack (higher temperatures = more difficult hacks). There quite a variety of hacks placed throughout the book. Not once did I feel that the book was padded with something that really didn't belong in the book. If anything Perl Hacks opened my eyes to things that I would never have thought to do, but could easily see as being useful. I wouldn't have thought to create my own personal module bundles for moving my Perl programs between machines (I've always done it the old fashioned way: run, cpan install, repeat), but hack #31 makes it so "of course" that I'm thinking of including this in all of my Perl code that I ship. Hack #74 shows how to trace all of the modules your program uses (and all of their modules, too). Hack #52 is a simple hack ("Make Invisible Characters Apparent") but I can see this saving a developer or two some time when figuring out why their code isn't behaving properly. Of course, not all hacks in the book are productive (at least, not while you're programming). Hack #37, "Drink to the CPAN" is a drinking game you and your Perl buddies may want to try.

Perl Hacks is a short book, at less than 300 pages, but it's loaded with incredibly useful information. Much like the "Perl Cookbook" (also from O'Reilly) you'll find lots of useful items hidden in their pages. Many times I started with one hack, and finished the chapter reading the rest of the hacks because there were just that interesting. Perl Hacks is highly recommended for any Perl programmer to have on their programmer book shelf. Sure, you might be able to find some of the hacks out there on the net, but I think you'll find as I have that this is more of a go-to reference for finding out some of the more interesting corners of Perl.

I received this book as a token of appreciation for my contributions to
the 2006 Perl Advent Calendar. It's the first book I read as part of the
O'Reilly Hacks' series of books, and it proved to be a light yet informative and entertaining
read.

The book covers various useful "hacks" or small tricks that allow one to
achieve a lot of cool tasks when working with Perl. These tricks are unorthodox
and stretch the limit of one's Perl knowledge. Since they require an advanced
knowledge and understanding of Perl, I would recommend this book only for Perl
experts. Some of the B:: using modules were even too high-level for me to
understand how they worked internally. However, I understood the purpose of the
code in all cases, even if I didn't understand the code itself.

So it is a recommended read for people who've worked with Perl a lot,
and wish to learn many new and useful tricks. Perl Hacks for Perl hackers,
indeed!

To be completely honest, this isn't the book I thought it was going to be. Most O'Reilly Hacks books start off pretty simply and in a few chapters take you to the further reaches of their subject area. Whilst this is a great way to quickly get a good taste of a particular topic, it has the occasional disadvantage that for subjects that you know well, the first couple of chapters can seem a bit basic. As I know Perl pretty well, I thought I would be on familiar ground for at least half of the book.

I was wrong.

Oh, it started off easily enough. Making use of various browser and command line tools to get easy access to Perl documentation, creating some useful shell aliases to cut down typing for your most common tasks. "Oh yes", I thought smugly to myself, "I know all that". But by about Hack 5 I was reading about little tweaks that I didn't know about. I'd start a hack thinking that I knew everything that the authors were going to cover and end up frustrated that I was on the tube and couldn't immediately try out the new trick I had just learnt.

It's really that kind of book. Pretty much everyone who reads it will pick up something that will it easier for them to get their job done (well, assuming that their job involves writing Perl code!) And, of course, looking at the list of authors, that's only to be expected. The three authors listed on the cover are three of the Perl communities most respected members. And the list of other contributers reads like a who's who of people who are doing interesting things with Perl - people whose use.perl journals are always interesting or whose posts on Perl Monks are worth reading before other people's. Luckily, it turns out that all these excellent programmers can also explain what they are doing (and why they are doing it) very clearly.

Like all books in the Hacks series, it's a little bitty. The hacks are organised into nine broad chapters, but the connections between hacks in the same chapter can sometimes be a bit hard to see. But I enjoyed that. In places it made the book a bit of a rollercoaster ride. You're never quite sure what is coming next, but you know it's going to be fun.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more apt the fairground analogy seems. When you ask Perl programmers what they like about Perl, you'll often hear "fun" mentioned near the top of the list. People use Perl because they enjoy it. And the authors' enjoyment of Perl really comes through in the book. It's obvious that they really wanted to show people the things that they thought were really cool.

Although I did learn useful tips from the earlier part of the book, it was really the last three chapters that were the most useful for me. Chapter 7, Developer Tricks, had a lot of useful things to say about testing, Chapter 8, Know Thy Code, contains a lot of information on using Perl to examine your Perl code and Chapter 9, Expand Your Perl Foo was a grab-bag of obscure (but still useful) Perl tricks.

So where does this book fit in to O'Reilly's Perl canon? I can't recommend it for beginners. But if you're a working Perl programmer with a couple of years' experience then I'd be very surprised if you didn't pick up something that will be useful to you. And don't worry about it overlapping with other books in your Perl library - offhand I can't think of anything in the book that has been covered in any previous Perl book.

All in all, this would make a very useful addition to your Perl library.

From the title, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Perl Hacks. Was it going to be about rummaging around in Perl's internals? Making Perl do clever, yet ultimately dumb and pointless tricks? It turns out that, while there is some fairly voodooish material here, some of it quite playful, on the whole it's a very practical book. Aimed firmly at the advanced Perl programmer who knows when it's appropriate to mess about with the symbol table, temporarily turn off warnings, or crack out one of the B:: modules, this is a collection of 101 suggestions to improve your productivity, boggle your mind about what Perl can do, or both.

The content reminds me a little of the likes of Exceptional C++ Style, a mixture of advanced best practices, and things which you may not need to know, but you'll probably still be interested in finding out how it works. For instance, have you ever considered tieing an array or hash variable to a function? Ever wanted to name a supposed anonymous subroutine? Print out the source code as well as the line number of a syntax error? Nor me, but Perl Hacks shows how it could be useful. These are illustrative of the spirit of the book.

My favourite material was probably the chapter on modules. Included are how-tos for outputting all the modules used in a package, automatically reloading modules in running code, shortening long package names with the CPAN 'aliased' module, and making up your own bundle of modules for easy installation. There's also an interesting object chapter with subjects such as: inside out objects, using YAML for serialisation, using traits and autogeneration of accessors.

Additionally, there's a little on using those scary B:: packages, using modules which use the B:: packages or other dark magic (e.g. peeking inside closures), some fairly hardcore tracing and profiling, that touches on some Perl VM internals. Also worth mentioning is the hack that hijacks the angle bracket glob operator to create Haskell/Python-style list comprehensions.

You are going to have to be one scarily gifted Perl hacker not to find something useful or at least thought-provoking at regular intervals throughout this book. My only complaint is that the hack format, which the blurb on the back of the book describes as a "short lesson", does not lend itself equally well to all hacks. While I liked the chapter on objects, some of the hacks (in particular the traits hack, some of the testing material) were too short.

If you like the sound of a book that's somewhere between Perl Cookbook, Perl Best Practices and the second edition of Advanced Perl Programming, you're going to love this.

In a time when new computer languages are dime a dozen, perl unquestionably retains its beauty. Keeping with the philosophy of perl - there is more than one way to do it - the book shows you ingenious ways to work with this powerful language. This is a true hacks book and meant mostly for the advanced user. Before reading this book, I didn't even realize what I didn't know and I rate myself just short of contributing to CPAN. Even if you have read all the popular books - Perl Programming, Perl Best Practices etc. you'll still find a lot of gems.

Simply put if you like perl, you'll love this book. Welcome to the next level...