Updates
Latest Tweet
What's New?
Check out for latest innovation, a computer based training video collection
Like this Page
Perl Cookbook Review by A. P. Chamberlain
A model for technical books
The first _Perl Cookbook_ was great. This one is fantastic.
When a programming language, operating system, or the like undergoes significant changes, many publishers of technical books seem to have a policy of making the bare minimum of changes to the current edition of their book on the subject and then publishing it as a whole new edition, thicker and with a higher price tag. O'Reilly, by and large, isn't like that; a new edition of any of their books is more often than not a substantial reworking.
In this mode, the 1st edition of the _Perl Cookbook_ was obviously intended as a companion volume to _Programming Perl_; but the present (2nd) edition could stand alone as both a reference manual to the language in general and a source of ideas and working code to be adapted to almost any project. Most everything in _Programming Perl_ is here too, but described differently by the different authors, in a way that I find often makes more sense. For example, the discussion of OOP in Perl (Chapter 13) is much more straightforward than the treatment of the subject in _Programming Perl_ for a programmer who already has significant experience with another object-oriented language (in my case, C++).
Bottom line: combined with the embarrassment of riches online at[...], this book should give the intermediate- to experienced-level programmer all they could ever need to write great Perl code.