Computer Science and Perl Programming: Best of TPJ

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 744 pages
• Published by: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
• Edition: 1st Edition November 15, 2002
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0596003102
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0596003104
• Book Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 1.7 inches
• Weighs: 2.6 pounds

Product Review
"This great work from O'Reilly is the first in a valuable series of revised and edited reprints of the very best articles from the Journal. If you're looking for simple answers to generic problems, then this work is certainly not for you. On the other hand, for a thrilling, thought provoking read which will certainly stretch and enliven your coding approach, this volume comes highly recommended." - Martin Howse, Linux User & Developer, issue 27

Product Description
In its first five years of existence, The Perl Journal ran 247 articles by over 120 authors. Every serious Perl programmer subscribed to it, and every notable Perl guru jumped at the opportunity to write for it. TPJ explained critical topics such as regular expressions, databases, and object-oriented programming, and demonstrated Perl's utility for fields as diverse as astronomy, biology, economics, AI, and games. The magazine gave birth to both the Obfuscated Perl Contest and the Perl Poetry contest, and remains a proud and timeless achievement of Perl during one of its most exciting periods of development. Computer Science and Perl Programming is the first volume of The Best of the Perl Journal, compiled and re-edited by the original editor and publisher of The Perl Journal, Jon Orwant. In this series, we've taken the very best (and still relevant) articles published in TPJ over its 5 years of publication and immortalized them into three volumes. This volume has seventy articles devoted to hard-core computer science, advanced programming techniques, and the underlying mechanics of Perl. Here's a sample of what you'll find inside:

• Jeffrey Friedl on Understanding Regexes
• Mark Jason Dominus on optimizing your Perl programs with Memoization
• Damian Conway on Parsing
• Tim Meadowcroft on integrating Perl with Microsoft Office
• Larry Wall on the culture of Perl

Written by 41 of the most prominent and prolific members of the closely-knit Perl community, this anthology does what no other book can, giving unique insight into the real-life applications and powerful techniques made possible by Perl. Other books tell you how to use Perl, but this book goes far beyond that: it shows you not only how to use Perl, but what you could use Perl *for*. This is more than just The Best of the Perl Journal -- in many ways, this is the best of Perl.

Reader Reviews
Computer Science and Perl Programming is a collection of 70-odd articles from The Perl Journal magazine. As the title suggests it focusses on more of the theoretical side of perl. This is the first volume in a series of three books. The second one focusses on web and graphics, and the third one on games and diversions. CS & PP is divided into seven sections as follows: Beginner Concepts, Regular Expressions, Computer Science, Programming Techniques, Software Development, Networking and Databases. The articles are straight reprints from TPJ and are written by a number of leading perl people such as Larry Wall, Damian Conway, Mark Jason Dominus, etc. Jon Orwant, the publisher of TPJ is the editor for this book. I haven't finished this book yet but I've greatly enjoyed the articles I've read. A vast array of topics are covered, such as B-Trees, random number generators, benchmarking, makemaker, DBI and even Win32::ODBC and Microsoft Office. There's something for every perl programmer in this book. Highly recommended.