Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 800 pages
- Published by: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
- Edition: 2nd Edition June 2002
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0596002416
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0596002411
-
Book Dimensions:
8.9 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
- Weighs: 2.1 pounds
Product Review
Perl in a Nutshell strives to be a perfect set of socket tools for the active Perl programmer. By and large, it succeeds, providing endless and well-thought-out lists and tables on the language's modules, flags, and extensions. The authors briefly address basic learner's questions--such as the difference between a hash and an array--but these concepts are not the purpose of the book. (Those new to Perl would be better off with others in the O'Reilly Perl series, such as
Learning Perl, while programmers making the switch to Perl can pick up the nuances of the language with
Programming Perl.) This book is pure Perl reference, briefly covering Perl/Tk (for GUI Perl programs on Unix and Windows 95/NT) and Perl for Win 32.
The authors do start at the very beginning, and even in a self-described "desktop quick reference" find the time to comment on less urgent--but still interesting--Perl-related matters (like how to find online help amidst the "Perl culture"). The format of the book makes sections on topics such as Perl debugging easily understandable, illustrating how to make an interactive and timesaving environment.
Of particular convenience is the outstanding section on the standard Perl modules. A four-page "quick look" allows you to easily scan through short definitions of all the modules and find the entry you're looking for. An index with full definitions for each section follows, showing you how to use each section and providing a more in-depth explanation (and often, examples).
Perl in a Nutshell concludes--as you might expect--with an great and well-cross-referenced index.
--Jennifer Buckendorff
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Review
"In a nutshell, Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible." --
Larry Wall, creator of Perl"What can I say? This is a nutshell book, and thus the quality is excellent. Being a regular user of the 1st edition of Perl in a Nutshell (does that say more about the book or my perl programming I wonder ) I fully expected this to be as good if not better. I was not disappointed. " Northampton Linux User group
Reader Reviews
This review is from: Perl in a Nutshell (Paperback)
My 2-star review is from the perspective of an intermediate Perl user. From my exp. with 'Unix in a Nutshell', I expected this book to be all I needed in my briefcase at work. As it turns out, I'll take the "Camel" (Programming Perl) and leave this uninspiring book at home. Let me give you an example: I was poring over a (slightly) complicated regular expression, trying to figure out what was going on...there seemed no rhyme or reason to it.....there were way too many spaces and yet the pattern was matching!! I then noticed the "x" option on the end of it: /reg-ex/x Thinking this could be the culprit, I broke out Perl:NUTSHELL...I found the appropriate table and it said: this option used to Enable Extended regular expressions. Ah-ha! But wait, what are Extended regular Epressions, and what is the deal with all these extra spaces in my reg-ex? I forwarded a bit and found the section about Extended Regular Expressions. And I found.........nothing. As it turns out (after looking in the Camel), the "x" means that all whitespace in the pattern is ignored, hence all the darn spaces. I made a point to look (again) for this bit of syntactic info in Perl:NUTSHELL, and it is not there. So what is the use of this book then, considering it is missing such a BASIC SYNTAX rule? Good question. Another gripe: where's the freakin examples? While I don't expect NUTSHELL books to EXPLAIN the examples tutorial style, I do expect some basic usage examples to help me with commands I havn't used (again, see Unix in a Nutshell)!! Another quick example for you Perl non-gurus (like myself): I came upon the Perl "filetest" operator "-t"....but the test had no following argument (e.g. the file's name), so I was confused. Off to the Nutshell. Oops. Nothing there except the shortest little description possible. Sigh. Back to the Camel, where I found that this particular file test operator defaults to a filehandle, <STDIN
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