Pro Perl Parsing (Pro)

I thoroughly enjoyed thisI write and maintain a fair amount of Perl, and matching and parsing patterns is often the largest part of the work.

— A.P. Lawrence, Information and Resources for Unix and Linux Systems

Perl, one of the world's most diffuse programming languages, was born out of the need to resolve the creator's dissatisfaction with what were at the time standard data-parsing solutions. Indeed, since the 1.0 release in 1987, Perl has been heralded for its powerful parsing capabilitiesfeatures that are further enhanced through the thousands of Perl extensions made available through CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network).

Pro Perl Parsing begins with several chapters devoted to key parsing principles, discussing topics pertinent to regular expressions, parsing grammars, and parsing techniques. This material sets the stage for later chapters, which introduce numerous and powerful CPAN parsing modules, and provide an ample supply of example applications.

About The Author
Christopher Frenz is a bioinformaticist at New York Medical College and is the author of Visual Basic and Visual Basic.NET for Scientists and Engineers. Frenz is an expert in Perl and scientific programming, in addition to the .NET platform.

Reader Reviews
Some of this was a little over my head. I'm "ok" with regular expressions, but when it gets into grammars, I'm a little weak and have some room to grow. That's OK: I know I need to learn more in this area. After all, what's the point of a book if it doesn't help you grow? I liked that this introduced and explained parsing related CPAN modules that I otherwise might have been afraid to touch (CPAN is a great resource, but there's so much there that it intimidates those of us who aren't real Perl experts). The examples generally related to things I do every day, so that was helpful. I'll need to spend more time in the grammar sections, and try out some of the CPAN modules, but this book is a definite keeper.