Product Description
With the LWP (Library for WWW in Perl) suite of modules, your programs can download and extract information from the Web.Written by a contributor to LWP, and with a foreword by one of LWP's creators, Perl & LWP is the authoritative guide to using this powerful and popular toolkit.You'll learn how to navigate the Web with LWP, fetching web pages, submitting forms, managing cookies, and accessing authenticated web sites.The book also demonstrates using three different techniques, regular expressions, tokens, and tress, to extract information from HTML.The many detailed case studies show you how to apply this knowledge to real world situations, from downloading news stories to e-commerce. Perl & LWP is a must have for Perl programmers who want to automate and mine the Web.Amazon.com Review
Perl & LWP sets out to unwrap the Library for the Web in Perl (LWP), which is a collection of modules that make it easier to access and pick apart Web pages (and FTP-accessible files, and outgoing e-mail messages) from within your Perl programs. The book succeeds wonderfully, not only in conveying the technical aspects of LWP programming, but in making clear the fun of doing work that's very well suited to Perl. Sean Burke assumes that his readers know something about Perl, albeit not much, and a similar amount about HTML. He does a great job of explaining how LWP functions fit into Perl programs, and how you can use them to make reference to Internet resources far more easily than before.

Burke's narrative takes the form of a guided tour in which he introduces his readers to aspects of the LWP modules one by one. His tone is generally straightforward (sharp commentary alternates with brief code listings, with occasional passages of reference material), but there's sometimes an undercurrent of exuberance that makes the reader want to get going with his or her own programming right away. Overall, the emphasis is on teaching both LWP and Perl itself to the extent necessary to do LWP work. Because of the concise and nicely indexed code modules, though, you'll find this book useful as a reference after you're under way with LWP. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to program with LWP and Perl itself. All of LWP's strong points--including HTML parsing (with tokens and trees as well as with regular expressions), HTML generation and modification, manipulation of HTML forms, and the operation of spiders--are covered. This book has more of a tutorial tone than any similar reference material on the Internet. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Honest Assessment of Burke's Perl & LWP
This is not your typical clunker with endless pages of filler material. It gets right to the point. If you want to learn about using Perl to interact with the internet, this would be a good book to help you get there. I have purchased several Perl books that supposedly teach you how to write code for use with the internet, but they are difficult to understand, and most of the examples just don't work. This book is an exception to that trend. It is the only one I have found so far that has useable, workable examples. The subject matter is still challenging, but Burke is able to explain it enough to give you a clue. If you are looking for help in handling HTTP programmatically, then here is your book.

A Wonderful Book
I bought this book to get information automatically on japanese stocks(for example, charts, price, volume, PER, PBR, ROE, ROA, News, messages on Yahoo! Japan BBS for stocks) from the WEB every day.

Somehow this book has not yet translated into Japanese language.
I think this book would sell very well if translated into Japanese. Many demands.

This book is self-contained about the WEB, so you need little Perl programming rules and don't have to have knowledge on the Internet Protocols(HTTP) at all.

In most cases, all you need to do is to modify an example program on this book for your use very little.

This book can teach you expert-level web scraping/munging.
If you aren't yet comfortable using object-oriented Perl modules, the multitude of examples will at least allow you see how it's done even if you're a bit fuzzy on what's happening 'underneath' when you call object methods. If you're comfortable learning how to do something without knowing exactly why it works, then the author's clear step-by-step explantions and numerous progressively more powerful examples should make this book accessible even to relatively innexperienced Perl programmers.

More experienced programmers will understand better why things work, but any Perl programmer will set this book down feeling empowered to turn the web into their own valet. No longer do you need to check multiple sites looking for interesting information. Instead, you can readily author code to do that for you and alert you when items of interest are found. You can use these tools to free up personal time, to harvest information to inform business decisions, to automate tedious web application testing, and a zillion other things.

The author's clear exploration of the relevant Perl modules leaves the reader with a good depth of understanding of what these modules do, when you might want to use which module, and how to use them for real world tasks. Before reading the book, I knew of these modules, but they were a rather intimidating pile. I'd used a few of them on occasion for rather limited projects, but was reluctant to invest the time required to read all of the documentation from the whole collection. Mountains of method-level documentation do not a tutorial make. This book takes all of that information, selects the most important parts, and ensures that those parts are covered in progressively more powerful and/or flexible examples.

If you know Perl and you're sick of 'working the web' to get information and you want the web to work for you instead, then you need this book. I had a personal project that was on the back burner for a couple of years because it just sounded too hard. The weekend after I finished this book, I wrote what I had previously thought to be the hard part of that project and it was both easy and fun. This book makes hard things not just possible, but actually easy.

-matt

Great book!
If you are unfamiliar with LWP and web scraping, or HTML parsing using tokens and trees, I strongly recommend this book.It's the best *introduction* to these topics I've been able to find.Sean's style is clear and concise-just what I expect from an O'Reilly book.

To get the most out of this book, you'll want to be familiar with Object Oriented programming in Perl, because (with the exception of LWP::Simple) all the modules discussed in this book use objects.

Also, don't expect the LWP sample code in the book to work correctly.Many of the sites that the scripts try to "scrape" have changed their layout since this book was published, braking the scripts.This isn't a problem though, because the samples Sean provides are very short and clear, so it's not necessary to run them in order to figure out how they work.

Terrible, bug-infested book...
I really don't know how the previous 5 reviews gave this book 5 stars.I was really excited about this book when I first read the reviews, and now here I am only a few chapters in and already thinking about dumping it altogether.This book has so many flaws for its size, the biggest of which was the codes.I am no Perl expert, but could find my way around in a decent size program.However, no examples I have tried so far in the book actually worked, and some of these are just 10-20 lines long.I am completely new to LWP, I guess like anyone who would buy this book, so it's hard for me to see what the author is doing.The explanation of the code didn't help much either.As oppose to explaining the steps, he just said "the code below does this".And it's pretty obvious little or no editing has gone into this book.If you do buy this book, you'll probably want to make a trip to the Errata page at the Oreilly website.The amount of typos, printing errors, warnings and grammatical mistakes found by readers and editors listed on this page rivals the usuable content of the book itself.You know what, I have spent way too much on this book already..... ... Read more

Product Description
The primary interface for database programming in Perl is DBI, a database-independent package that provides aconsistent set of routines regardless of what database productyou use--Oracle, Sybase, Ingres, Informix, you name it.Programming the Perl DBI is coauthored by AlligatorDescartes, one of the most active members of the DBI community,and by Tim Bunce, the inventor of DBI. For the uninitiated, the bookexplains the architecture of DBI and shows you how to write DBI-based programs.For the experienced DBI dabbler, this book explains DBI's nuances andthe peculiarities of each individual DBD. This is the definitive book fordatabase programming in Perl.Amazon.com Review
The birth of new modules for the Perl scripting language is a regular occurrence, and the publication of an O'Reilly book about one of these modules is a sign of coming of age. Perl's DBI module, which facilitates the database-independent operation of Perl, achieves its rite of passage this month with the arrival of Alligator Descartes and Tim Bunce's excellent Programming Perl's DBI. Perl's DBI interface is maintained by Bunce and includes submodule interfaces to Oracle, MySQL, Sybase, Microsoft ODBC, and many other smaller databases. O'Reilly Perl book aficionados take note: this is the cheetah book, named for the animal that graces its cover.

Far from being a formalized how-to or man page, Programming Perl's DBI is a mini textbook in database programming,ideal for CPAN-savvy Perl programmers with little or no experience in database programming. Descartes and Bunce develop primitive notions of databases by using flat files, and they introduce relational databases with careful didactic motivation. The example database used throughout the book contains ancient sacred monolithic sites in the UK and elsewhere, of which Stonehenge is the most famous. Readers will learn about these primitive places while storing, updating, deleting, sorting, and locking their descriptors using flat files, nonrelational and relational databases, and a tutorial on SQL. The last chapters describe the peculiarities of interacting with ODBC and introduce DBI's Perl-less diagnostic shell and database proxying.

The authors use many modules--including DBI itself--that are not part of the vanilla Perl distribution, and Descartes and Bunce introduce them without explaining where to find or build them. Perl newbies with no CPAN experience may find themselves derailed early. The Storage module seems not to be available on CPAN at all (at the time of this writing). Fortunately, DBI and friends build, test, and install seamlessly under Linux/Red Hat 6.1.

At 350 pages, Programming the Perl DBI is 60 percent text--filled with highly annotated Perl code--and 40 percent appendices covering a detailed specification of DBI and 3-to-5-page descriptions of each of the 14 supported databases. Brevity is a large component of this book's wit. Clarity is the rest of it. --Peter Leopold ... Read more

Customer Reviews (49)

Not so relevant now
I think, what is covered in the book is more theory. No practical examples on how to connect to various databases (ex: MySQL, Oracle). I would rather say, it is outdated and more useful information can be found on the web. I shouldn't have bought it although it just costed me [...].

The standard for Peral Database Programming
If you are serious about using Perl to interface with any database, then this is the only book will will ever need.Amazon was the only place I could find a copy, since the book is currently out-of-print.

pretty good book, but so is the CPAN documentation
This is a (the definitive) book on Perl DBI.I swapped book-for-book with a former co-worker for this.I keep it in the office for the newbies.

If you're already a pro at PERL, you should be able to get by with just the CPAN documentation.However, if your employer is footing the bill, get it. :-)

However if you're new to PERL and need to use DBI, get it.

Very nice tips and tricks you can pick up, even a few for the pros.

An alright book for the DBI beginner
The database-oriented view of programming has become increasingly popular, and it is of great importance for all serious programmers to understand how to use their favorite language to manipulate the database systems.With the variety of database systems out there, it can be a real challenge to learn what there is to know.For the Perl programmer, however, there is this book on the matter, and it will probably be all you'll need to get started working with database programming in no time.Other reviewers have stated that this is a regurgitation of the docs.This is partially true.But the docs are very bland, and this book presents the information in a much more informative, and easy to read manner.With it, you can begin programming the DBI within a week (a day if you already know SQL and skip the chapter on the Berkley DB system).Recommended for anyone interested in learning how to use Databases with Perl.If you already know the DBI, the book wont be of much help, maybe as a reference, but I'd only pick it up if you don't know it, or are still inexperienced at it.

still a valuable reference for multiple databases
This book has been a valuable reference of mine for several years for web database programming projects. I bought the book soon after it was released and continue to use it - sometimes on a daily basis depending upon the project I am currently developing. I realized from the beginning that much of the material in this book came from the online documentation and have still found the book to be useful enough to stay on my A-list of reference materials. Applications like CGIScripter need to utilize up to half a dozen different databases so I have found the reference section on each database be the section I often turn to first. I have not found this info available anywhere in the online documentation. When you program and debug on multiple computers with multiple windows open simultaneously, having a reference book is often more manageable than opening another window on the computer. And for those times when I am struggling with an especially troublesome programming issue, I have found it very helpful to sit in my easy chair with a reference book like the Perl DBI book in order to research the problem. The only reason I am not giving the book 5 stars is that it hasn't been updated in a few years so it doesn't include info on some of the new DBI supported databases like SQLite. ... Read more

Product Description
Long a secret weapon of the hedge-fund elite, the DeMark indicators are now used by more than 35,000 traders. This book provides an easy-to-follow system for using the indicators to identify market turns as they happen. Author Jason Perl gives a concise introduction to thirty-nine of the indicators, and then shows how to combine the indicators and time frames to achieve a higher probabilty of trading success. Thomas R. DeMark, the creator of the DeMark indicators and one of the most well-respected practitioners of technical analysis, wrote the foreword to this book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

For the true Demarkist!!!!
This book does a great job of explaining TD Demark indicators! The author also illustrates how he uses the indicators, which gives even greater insight. This book is for the technician, because you can easily create a trading strategy using TD Demark Indicators!!

A Fascinating Read
I thought DeMark Indicatiors was an interesting book because his proprietary techniques are quite a bit different from much of the technical indicators you see out there. Unfortunately, I only had moderate success in actually programming these indicators and I feel like the author could have been a little more clear about exactly what formula's to use. I still feel like it's a very good read to get you thinking in different ways about how the markets function.

A Set of Definitions with Minimal Explanation
The presentation of the book is confusing.Some of the definitions contain logical errors.The charts usually repeat what he had said in the definition section without further explanation.Mathematical formulas are provided for only a few of indicators.

All I got out of the book is that the author is knowledgeable in the subject matter.However, his book doesn't seem to have a clear goal.It failed to systematically presents the rules as they contain errors and few formulas.It also failed to explain the thinking behind each indicators.Some of the definitions are missing when the terms first appear, only injected as notes in later chapters.With this book, I wasn't able to obtain insights to DeMark's thinking nor a set of rules for trading.

Student and Master
To understand Thomas DeMark this is the best way or maybe the only way?
But as all theories it only shows a part/an aspect of the fascinating reality of trading!

There more than 70 TD indicators!!!
This review is in no way a reflection on Jason Perl. He did a 5***** job explaining Demark indicators. When I checked some of the website mentioned in the book especially CQG, I found there are close to 70 indicators starting from TD Abs Retrace....TD FlipFlop....TD Propulsion....TD Meghan.....TD Rocke...TD Sequential.....TD Waldo....TD Wave....TD UVdTV.
Some of them have variations like TD Channel1, TD Channel2, TD Pressure TD Pressure1 etc..
Many reviewers havewritten how good these indicators are, my question is how do they use it. In a market situation where you have to make decision amongst 70+ TD indicator what is the deciding factor. The author and book have done their job, If some of you could post your experience using these indicators in real life that would be a great help to everyone. ... Read more

Product Description
Compiled and edited from transcriptions of three workshop/demonstrations that took place at the Esalen Institute in 1968, the first section of this book includes four lectures wherein Perls presents a clear explanation in simple terms of the basic ideas he believed underlie the philosophy and methodology of Gestalt therapy.The lectures are followed by verbatim transcripts of work Perls did with workshop participants.This Gestalt Journal edition includes an introduction by Michael Vincent Miller that explores the political and cultural milieu when Gestalt therapy leapt to the "theatrical forefront" of the human potential movement. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

you sent me the wrong book the Gestalt Therapy Verbatim
you sent me the worng book i will be sending it back soon as i get a address to send it too.

Brilliantly Insightful Probings into the Human Psyche
Fritz was a genius, and this book proves it.The therapeutic method he developed helped his clients get beneath the surface features of their difficulties and see and deal with the existential issues that underlay them.The transcripts the book contains reveal the dramatic results that his masterly application of the method could produce.

CLASSIC
Transcripts of Fritz teaching and working - simple, direct.The exact technique wouldn't work for me, but the underlying principles are brilliant - probably for their simplicity and directness.

Showing What Gestalt Therapy is through Action
Fritz Perls was very masterful at working with people.The book contains transcripts of how he interacted with others in a therapeutic context.He was able to effect changes very rapidly.The book has the theory, too, but it would not have made as much sense without the transcripts.I felt I got what Gestalt was about from this book.I have since prefered the Focusing approach, even as an explanation of how Fritz Perls worked, but this book inspired me and gave me the courage to confront my own challenges and then work with others.The key is that our organism is trying to meet a challenge and find closure, to integrate a gestalt, come to a kind of wholeness.We block ourselves from this, partly by not giving ourselves permission to feel our anger.

Action!
I've read many books by the great psychological theorists like Jung, Adler, Horney etc., but none of them cut to the heart of becoming like Fritz does. Even the other third wave analysts like Rogers and Maslow stilltake a more abstract approach: they suggest ideas on how to functionoptimally in interpesonal relationships, but don't dig very deep into theapplication, or the how. This book uses practices that have parallels inZen buddhism and other sorts of experience-oriented disciplines, butdoesn't praise any particular system or thinker. The presentation of thematerial is very simple and informal--taken from live lectures. Thus,nothing is academically obscure. Rather, its as though one is listening toa very integrated human being who is beyond the need to aggrandize himselfthrough helping others. This is a very good book for people that wish toopen themselves up to the full experience of living. ... Read more

Product Description
Perl/Tk, the marriage of Perl with the Tk toolkit,allows you to build Perl programs with an attractive,intuitive GUI interface. Mastering Perl/Tk isthe one and only book you need for learning Perl/Tkand for mastering the techniques of experiencedPerl/Tk programmers.The first half of the book contains the basics onhow to use Perl/Tk, with coverage of all the standardwidgets and a thorough tutorial of the geometry managers. Mastering Perl/Tk then branches out into advancedapplications, including extensive program examples.The result is a book accessible for novices, andinvaluable for experienced programmers ready to learnthe next step in the elegant and effective use of Perl/Tk.Nancy Walsh is the author of Learning Perl/Tkand Steve Lidie is the author of the Perl/TkPocket Reference and a series of Perl/Tk articlesin The Perl Journal. Together, they have written Mastering Perl/Tk to be the definitive guide toPerl/Tk. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Excellent for more advanced Pe;rl/Tk applications
I had a Perl/Tk application started and my customer was impressed but when I received this book, I was able to perform a number of GUI items which were beyond the capacity of the Learning Perl/Tk which I had been previously using or the Internet queries I had used.The applications were easy to find using the index and easy to implement.The depth of this book was sufficient to take my application to a much more sophisticated level, closer to what I could have done using JAVA.I had been unable to find the answers found here on either the Internet or the previous Perl Books I had used.

Outdated!! - perl/tk is not even used anymore
The only reason you would want to buy this book is if you want to modify an existing perl/tk program.Even then, I do not recommend buying it.

Perl/tk is discontinued!!!!!!ActivePerl now uses the package tkx to bridge tk and perl.Although similar to perl/tk, it has many new updates not included in this book.Plus, the syntax is new.

Here is a good explanation as why tkx is now used:

"Because Perl/Tk extricated Tcl from Tk, it took considerable effort to track newer Tk releases, and so has waned in modern years. The recommended Tk binding for Perl now is the "Tkx" module, a much smaller layer that provides a direct bridge to the Tcl API that Tk exposes." -tkdocs dot com

Mastering may be an overstatement
This book provides a lot of information about Perl/Tk, but in a somewhat scattered fashion, making true mastery of the subject an intensive process. It is an excellent learning tool, but the reader should be aware that there is much to learn beyond what is presented here.

don't buy Perl/Tk book
I'm a big fan of the O'Reilly Perl books.Most of them are very well written, and can really increase your knowledge about a topic.But this book is an exception.Simply put, it's horrible.Don't buy this book.It's poorly written, has a bad style, and provides nothing that you couldn't easily get from online documentation.

Get this one INSTEAD of 'Learning Perl/Tk', not in addition to
This book has so far given me all the information I've
needed to write usable GUIs.However, I share the concern
expressed by other reviewers that the the titles 'Learning
Perl/Tk' and 'Mastering Perl/Tk' can be misleading.While
it's reasonable to assume that the 'Learning' volume is
introductory/tutorial while the 'Mastering' volume is for
advanced techniques, this is not the case.The 'History of
this Book' section of the preface describes it as an
expansion of 'Learning Perl/Tk', not a sequel or supplement.
There is no need to buy both books.
... Read more

Product Description
The book on Perl that experienced Perl programmers have been looking for, Effective Perl Programming explains idiomatic Perl, covering the latest release (Version 5). It includes information and useful examples about the structure, functions, and latest capabilities of the language, such as self-documenting object-oriented modules.Learn from Hall's answers to "real life" questions and problems he receives from newsgroups and his Perl seminars.Amazon.com Review
Effective Perl Programming is a gem of a Perl book. Itsauthor, Joseph Hall, is a well-known Perl instructor and frequentposter on the seminal comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup. The book'stechnical editor is none other than Randal Schwartz, noted Netpersonality, enigmatic author of Learning Perl, andcontributor to Programming Perl.

Hall has distilled his years of Perl experience into a book for Perlprogrammers that is both fluid and fun to read. It's somewhat likereading the Perl FAQ; even when you think you know everything, there'sso much you don't know.

Effective Perl Programming has aclear layout: the text is easy on the eyes and the monospaced fontmakes a clear distinction between backticks and single quotes. Halluses his PEGS (PErl Graphical Structures) notation to show thedifference between Perl's different types of data structures and howeverything ties together.

Packed with great examples and codesnippets, this book is an excellent source of tips and tricks to makeyour Perl programs faster and easier to read. You'll also find astrong section on using the Perl debugger to improve your Perlprogramming skills. In yet another section, Hall walks the readerthrough the creation of a complete XS module that can boost theperformance of array shuffling eight-fold. All in all, this is a greatbook for programmers who want to move beyond plain, verbose Perltoward a more succinct and powerful coding style. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (46)

Right ways to write Perl
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!

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

A fast track to idiomatic Perl
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.

Terrific Book
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.

Great Perl Book
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Fritzo, Fritzer and Fritzession
"To be the only one, and to know that you are real--that's sanity, isn't it?"
- Lila Loomis in Psycho

A great book about great approach. This is where you should start if you are interested in the Gestalt therapy. The first part of this book tells you the basic concepts of Gestalt and explains easily the basic principles about the relationship between the client and the therapeutist in the Gestalt framework.

I personally found the second part rather difficult to concentrate on. But I think that readers of English speaking ancestry will find it more easy to read.

Best thing in this book is that it is extremely easy and almost fun to read. I have read quite a few books about the Gestalt approach, and found reading this very enjoyable. Books by such specialists as Joseph Zinker and Claudio Naranjo are good and insightful, but not necessarily good ones to start with.

And remember that Fritz Perls himself wanted to be simple and clear in his writings and easy to approach. Like he himself said: "any reasonable approach to psychology not hiding behind a professional jargon must be comprehensible to the intelligent layman and must be grounded in the facts of human behaviour." This books is a real book and certainly no psychological jargon or BS. Even if you don't like it, you have to read only 200 pages.

A Very Readable Classic
All of Perls' books are an interesting read.Too bad the title sounds so clinical. You don't have to be a psychologist to enjoy this book. Anyone that wants to understand themselves and others better will be satisfied.

The Gestalt Approach & Eye Witness to Therapy
I HAVE A BOOK WITH THE SAME NAME WITH THIS ON THE COVER,THE LAST AND MOST COMPREHENSIVE WORK BY THE GENIUS WHO FATHERED GESTALT THERAP, AND CAN NOT FIND THIS IN YOUR BOOKS SHOWN I WOULD LIKE TO SELL THIS POCKETBOOK NOW. The author is the same .

Simplemente maravilloso
Este es mi libro favorito de los que ha escrito Perls.A mi juicio la síntesis de su trabajo y enseñanza es inmejorable.Para mí es material de consulta permanente.
Es un "must" para los que están interesados en acompañar sus procesos de terapia gestalt con los principios y fundamentos que subyacen a este mágico enfoque.

Essays and Transcripts
In an interview with Adelaide Bry, Perls refused to answer when asked what Gestalt Therapy was. He commented that he hated intellectualizing, and instead walked her through some exercises to demonstrate the integrative rather than the analytical nature of a gestalt-based approach. It's an interesting moment, and sheds some potential light on the best way to read this book.

Essentially what Perls believed was that in order to make intelligent and healthy decisions, you have to make conscious decisions. So the goal of therapy is to bring all the issues at play into consciousness so that by being aware of all the factors involved, real choices can be made in an informed fashion. He used theatrical techniques and group therapy to help his patients achieve their goals.

Perls is reported to have viewed the essays in the first portion of the book (The Gestalt Approach) as outdated, and instead wished that he could have made a film to convey his ideas. There are seven essays, which lay out the basic principles behind his theories and ideas:

Foundations
Neurotic Mechanisms
Here Comes the Neurotic
Here and Now Therapy
Peeling the Onion
Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion
Who is Listening?

I would tend to agree (with Perls' implied message) that reading the transcripts of group therapy sessions in the second part of the book (Eye Witness to Therapy) is much more illuminating for somebody who wants to get some insight into what really is involved in Gestalt Therapy.

For me at least, as a layman, it was much easier to get a feel for what was involved by reading the flow between the patients and the therapist in group than it was to digest the message in essay form.

Thought-provoking. ... Read more

Product Description
Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics covers the core Perl language and many of its module extensions, presenting them in the context of biological data and problems of pressing interest to the biological community.This book, along with Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics, forms a basic course in Perl programming.This second volume finishes the basic Perl tutorial material (references, complex data structures, object-oriented programming, use of modules--all presented in a biological context) and presents some advanced topics of considerable interest in bioinformatics. Biologists and computer scientists who have conquered the basics of Perl and are ready to move even further in their mastery of this versatile language will appreciate the author's well-balanced approach to applying Perl's analytical abilities to the field of bioinformatics. Full of practical examples and real-world biological problem solving, this book is a must for any reader wanting to move beyond beginner level Perl in bioinformatics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Good starting material for programming perl in bioinformatics
Combined with the authors other book, Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics, this book provides a good self-study guide for those interested in understanding bioinformatics. This book is useful for biologist who has some programming experience, as well as programmers with some biology knowledge. It's written in a style that should suite most readers, as I find it each and smooth to read. Those looking for strict definitions or theory should look elsewhere.

Only chapters 4, 5 and 9 make it a worthwhile "Masters" book
This book is definitely written for the biologist that knows some perl and not the experienced perl programmer. To the biologists who have some experience, this book will open up many new possibilities, but to a person with a few years of perl experience, many sections are skimpy and wasteful on topics better covered by other Perl books.

For example, for anyone with truely massive datasets, it might have been worth the mention of the performance cost/benefits of using BerkleyDBs and hash joins (180-3500 times). With improvements of 2-3 orders of magnitude for large sets, it would have been worth a complementary example in chapter 6 so that readers can weigh the alternatives for certain situations.

The book, however, is well worth the price just for chapters 4, 5 and 9.

4) Sequence Formats and Inheritance
5) A Class for Restriction Enzymes
9) Introduction to Bioperl

A good follow-on to Tisdall's other Perl book
This book is a continuation of Tisdall's "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" and thus illustrates more advanced Perl programming techniques. This book not only talks about Perl programming, but it goes into some detail on the subject of bioinformatics itself. It is assumed that the CS-type reader has a good understanding of biology and the goals of bioinformatic programming. Otherwise, the examples and projects within the book will not make sense. The following is a description of the book's contents:

Part I: OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING IN PERL
Chapter 1. Modular Programming with Perl - Talks about using modules so that other people can reuse your programs and you can reuse other people's modules in your own programs.

Chapter 2. Data Structures and String Algorithms - Talks about all of the different data structures available through Perl and how to build up special structures in Perl that you might need to describe complex data. Also mentions various string algorithms that are used in analyzing biological data and implements them in Perl.

Chapter 3. Object-Oriented Programming in Perl - Introduces object-orientation in Perl via a module that includes a class that keeps track of genes.

Chapter 4. Sequence Formats and Inheritance - How to convert sequence files into alternate formats such as FASTA and GCG. The object-oriented concept of inheritance is also introduced.

Chapter 5. A Class for Restriction Enzymes - By writing a more complex class, you get a bigger dose of object-orientated programming in biology.

Part II: PERL AND BIOINFORMATICS
Chapter 6. Perl and Relational Databases - Talks about SQL and the design of relational databases. MySQL is examined specifically.

Chapter 7. Perl and the Web - You learn about web programming in Perl by seeing how to put a laboratory on the Web via Perl and CGI.

Chapter 8. Perl and Graphics - Graphics programming in Perl is demonstrated when you learn to write a program that displays changing data to the Web. The graphical Perl module PD is discussed and demonstrated in a program.

Chapter 9. Introduction to Bioperl - Introduces the reader to Bioperl, which is a group of open source Perl modules used for bioinformatics programming. They provide many basic facilities so you don't have to worry about them.

Part III: Appendixes
Appendix A. Perl Summary
Appendix B. Installing Perl

I really thought this was a 5-star book. However, it is not obvious from the title that this is really volume two of a two volume set of books on Perl programming for the biologist, so I can see where the lower ratings might have come from.

Perhaps the CGI could have been omitted?
This is the sequel to his earlier beginner's book on Perl. Now, he goes further into usages of Perl. While experienced programmers will not find these terribly challenging, they are not the intended audience.

Of the topics, the most important is where he shows you how to interface with a SQL database. Given the sheer mass of sequence data generated these days, it is inevitable that efficient database usage be done. So he gives a quick tour of relational database design. With examples of how Perl has modules to submit and query the database. The treatment is somewhat cursory, since he has other, non-database topics to cover.

Of those, he includes CGI programming. This might be questionable. CGI code has proved incredibly hard to scale. Maybe he felt the necessity to include code for handling web servers. Unfortunately, a typical reader won't have enough experience to be aware of CGI's problems. The danger is that she actually starts coding CGI Perl. The true debugging and maintenance costs will not show up till later.

Good Companion text
This first half of the book focuses entirely on Object-Oriented(OO) Perl. The second half follows up with a general survey of various perl implementations of particular programming issues involving databasing, cgi, graphics, modules, etc, and BioPerl.

This book does a good job of applying Perl in OO for Biology in the first half of the book. In the second half he overviews a few broad topics in bioinformatics; he doesn't go super specific, but its a sufficient overview and for me sparked more interest in understanding how I can use perl to handle my informatics issues.

In the first half, the author does an excellent job on detailing the ins and outs of perl references and how to construct complex data structures. Indeed they are a bit strange looking at first, but the author breaks it down really good so pretty much anyone can understand it.

For me the most intriguing part of the book was in the second half, which included relational databases, graphics, and bioperl. In particular, the chapter that covers Perl DBI and DBD::mysql was really cool. That secion was very helpful for me because I am familiar with php/mysql, but have not ever used Perl to interact with Mysql before.

I especially liked the gif draw aka GD chapter. I had no idea how cool GD is. But moreover how it can be integrated with Perl to generate really cool looking plots. Before this book I always used gnuplot. But Tisdall shows you how to get to work with GD pretty good using basic practical examples.

The chapter on BioPerl was especially helpful as well. In particular, he shows you what he did to install the beast. He shows you how to use the CPAN shell and again its really beneficial to read through. It motivated me to pursue other topics in bioperl and how I can use it to query different ncbi databases for example.

Overall, the text provided a good overview on OO Perl and on various other topics involving Perl for Bioinformatics in general. I am glad I bought it. It was really very practical/useful - I refer to it all the time actually! ... Read more

Product Description
Modern bioinformatics encompasses a broad and ever-changing range of activities involved with the management and analysis of data from molecular biology experiments. Despite the diversity of activities and applications, the basic methodology and core tools needed to tackle bioinformatics problems is common to many projects. Building Bioinformatics Solutions provides a comprehensive introduction to this methodology, explaining how to acquire and use the most popular development tools, how to apply them to build processing pipelines, and how to make the results available through visualizations and web-based services for deployment either locally or via the Internet. The main development tools covered in this book are the MySQL database management system, the Perl programming language, and the R language for statistical computing. These industry standard open source tools form the core of many bioinformatics projects, both in academia and industry. The methodologies introduced are platform independent, and all the examples that feature have been tested on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

This advanced textbook is suitable for graduate students and researchers in the life sciences who wish to automate analyses or create their own databases and web-based tools. No prior knowledge of software development is assumed. Having worked through the book, the reader should have the necessary core skills to develop computational solutions for their specific research programmes. The book will also help the reader overcome the inertia associated with penetrating this field, and provide them with the confidence and understanding required to go on to develop more advanced bioinformatics skills. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Great Book! Responsible Authors!
This is a great book,I am very satisfied with it.

In fact, this book combines the most popular tools in bioinformatics:Perl, R and MySQL.

Some of us may be expert for one or two of these tools. But how to systemically to use them together, this book gives answers.

It aslo gives direction of how to go further if you want to master one of these tools.

Plus,it has a lot of practical examples which you can easily transform for your own work.

And I must say the authors are very responsibe. They answered my questions promptly and in details. I really apprecitate this.

Thank you.

Excellent book!
I'm very satisfied with this book.
Very clear explanations and examples.
Contains all the relevant chapters that one needs to get into bioinformatics.
... Read more

Product Description
This one goes on the 'keeper' shelf, for sure.

— Tony Lawrence, aplawrence.com

Combining the best features of C, UNIX utilities, and regular expressions, Perl has grown as one of the most powerful and popular scripting languages. The valuable Perl is often used forsystem administration, text processing and Web programming. It is even being used for more exotic areas, like bioinformatics. Perl is supported by all of the most prominent operating systems, including Windows, Unix, OS/2, Amiga, and others.

Pro Perl Debugging steps in to help resolve the dilemma of application testing and debugging&emdash;one of the biggest time commitments in a programmer's daily routine. What this book will do is rescue you from substandard application testing practices. The book commences with several chapters that overview the debugger's basic features, then covers common debugging scenarios. The concluding portion examines debugger customization, alternative debugging utilities, and debugging best practices.

Customer Reviews (6)

Five for content, Two or Three for Accuracy ...
Another reviewer said it best: while this book takes a laudable stab at demystifying the Perl debugger, the little errors are enough to drive one bats.

It goes without saying, or should do, that if your material depends on specific content being at specific lines of code, then the source file(s) you provide need to have that content at those line numbers, and not just "in the ballpark." I have already tried to plow through this book's Chapter 3 twice & have twice wound up wanting to throw the book across the room. And the typos, etc. are not limited to this kind of thing.

The authors write well, and the subject has interest, but someone did a poor job somewhere of making sure the finished product (including the downloadable source code) was a useful package.

Please, APress, revisit this one! Please revisit as well the apparent [APress website] policy of allowing readers to submit errata but not view the ones that have already been submitted. To be able to pre-correct one's copy would be a real timesaver for those of us following along in the code.

Nice Perl debugging reference
I was the print/warn debugging type of person before starting my current $job. I knew that there is this command `perl -d ...` but did not really used it. Just tried a few times and then returned back to good ole print(). However, when you are dealing with some HUGE codebase that you did not write (or wrote it 6 months ago), that print/warns can not help you all the time. While using a logging mechanism is also good, it will have limits too. You'll definitely need to use the debugger to see the program flow and test the code while executing it, etc.

Unfortunately, I saw this book rather late. It goes beyond the standard debugger usage and explains most topics in this area. It even encourages you to compile a separate debugging enabled version of perl and discusses lots of different debugging techniques.

A must have for every serious Perl programmer.

quite useful, but deserves a second edition
When I first saw a listing for this book, I assumed it was going to be a book about debugging Perl -- the title sort of led me in that direction.I thought it would give an overview of the common mistakes made by Perl programmers, how to catch them, how to correct them, and how to avoid making them in the first place.When I asked about the book, though, I found out that it's a book all about the Perl debugger.I use the debugger daily, and I only use a few of its features, so I was pretty excited about the book -- and even more excited to be getting a copy to review.

The only other book that really focuses on the debugger, as far as I know, is the Perl Debugger Pocket Reference, also by Richard Foley.I picked that up for $10 or so at a TPF auction and found it to be a decent pocket reference.I was hoping, though, that now I'd have a book that would cover the debugger in depth, soup to nuts.

Pro Perl Debugging does that, and it does it fairly well.It begins by explaining how and why the debugger can be used, and then introduces the most basic debugger commands.Subsequent chapters introduce new families of commands and options, and these new features are demonstrated through the use of the debugger on example code.Once all the commands and most of the options have been explained, there are a few chapters on specific challenges in debugging: forking and threading, debugging networked applications (like CGI apps), and regex debugging.The last few chapters cover GUI debugger frontends, profiling and optimizing, and the Perl compiler.

The book covers everything that I think it needs to cover, and covers it well enough that with some coding along, the reader can learn how to use the debugger and nearly all its features.

With all that said, though, I have to add that I think Pro Perl Debugging is an adequate book and not a great one.There are a number of technical errors in the book; most of these are just little mistakes that probably crept in because there was insufficient testing of the examples.While they're minor, they seem sure to cause confusion for readers who try the examples as they go.The examples themselves often seem arbitrary, and don't contribute much to the explanation of new features.At no point in the book did I ever think, "This example really made the usefulness of that new feature very clear."Usually, the feature's usefulness is self-evident, though.Unfortunately, some features are somewhat obscure, and are never very well explained.The dot command, which resets the working position to the current execution point, is particularly confusing.I only fully understood it after piecing together statements made about it across several chapters.The debugger prompt (a related issue) is also poorly explained, with some of its features never discussed.

The book's typographic conventions are ill-suited to the book's material, and in some cases seem to change from chapter to chapter.There is no distinction in the examples between user-entered text and debugger output.Editorial changes to the sample output (elisions, for example) are not handled in a consistent way.The structure of the book is also frustrating.Some chapters appear much later than seems appropriate (that on using the debugger as a REPL, for one).Others repeat material covered earlier.Finally, each chapter begins with a quotation.While this is sometimes a fun addition to an otherwise bland text, here the quotes seem random and the segue from quote to material is often strained.

I'm glad to have a copy of this book, and I've definitely learned some things from it.(Did you know that your debugger can spawn new xterms to handle forked processes?)I really hope that the book gets a second edition, because it has the potential to be an essential book for professional Perl programmers.

Invaluable
I am an experienced Perl developer and I've been using Perl debugger for years, and yet this book has paid for itself in less than an hour! It includes a couple of sample debugging sessions to familiarize the reader with the debugger commands, and offers multiple helpful tips on saving and replaying command history and setting environment variable to control the behavior of the debugger. And then it moves on to things that I was considering either hard or impossible.

Debugging live CGI scripts running under control of a web server - make Apache drop you into a debugger session after receiving a request, when using either traditional CGI or mod_perl.

Setting compile-time breakpoints to debug the code that runs BEFORE the first executable line in the script.

Debugging processes that fork multiple copies of themselves, controlling each instance through a separate debugger window.

The list goes on - if you do any development in Perl, this book will save you hours of work. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Perl has a Debugger?
Perl is one of the easiest language for doing "quirk and dirty" tasks, such as text manipulation and writing command-line utilities for your OS of choice.However, as any Perl programmer can tell you debugging can be a nightmare and most of rely on the old-fashioned print statement to aid most of our debugging work.As powerful as Perl is, one of the drawbacks has always been its lack of an efficient way to debug and test the code.Too often than not more time is spent debugging the code than actually writing the logic to do the task at hand!

In Pro Perl Debugging, Richard Foley and Andy Lester introduce and explain the rarely-seen, often under-utilized Perl Debugger (What?You didn't know one existed; fear not, neither did I until I read this book!).Each chapter takes you through the steps of using the debugger and introduces various new concepts throughout.Chapters are further subdivided into three sections that cover more broader topics such as the final section which is devoted to mainly reference and optimization of techniques learned in the previous sections.

You will learn the concept of what the authors term fixing the bug instead of merely finding the bug.As they point out, a lot of us pursue the task of finding a bug only to introduce other bugs as we try to pinpoint it down.This book provides a working guide to help you migrate from the print statement and sloppy code searching into a more defined, technique driven approach using the debugger.

The book is a great source for the experienced Perl programmer who wants to get a better handle over bug control and code debugging techniques.I would caution beginning Perl users to get a grasp first more on the language before diving into use of the debugger as it can be complex at times.However, seasoned Perl programmers will find a lot of the concepts and techniques given to be a great timesaver and tool for use within programs that both already exist and on the drawing board.
... Read more

Product Description
Perl & XML is aimed at Perl programmers who need to work with XML documents and data. The book covers all the major modules for XML processing in Perl.But this book is more than just a listing of modules; it gives a complete, comprehensive tour of the landscape of Perl and XML, making sense of the myriad of modules, terminology, and techniques.This book covers:

parsing XML documents and writing them out againworking with event streams and SAXtree processing and the Document Object Modeladvanced tree processing with XPath and XSLT

Customer Reviews (7)

An Archetypical O'Reilly Book
This is the sort of book that put O'Reilly on the map. Concise, practical, step-by-step, the kind of book that allows you to get significant amounts of actual work done by the time you finish the third chapter or so. The introduction to XML in chapter two is one of the best I've ever seen, and I've often recommended it for people as an XML Executive Summary, even those who will never write a line of Perl.

Like that late 2006 early 2007 meme says: "It does just what it says on the tin."

Review of Perl & XML--XML for Perl Programmers
XML has begun to appear everywhere. XML has long served in hidden roles on servers and in configuration files. Microsoft Word 2003 for Windows now supports reading and writing XML to in it's wordprocessingML format. Unlike MS Word's horrible "Save As Web Page" feature, wordprocessingML, or wordML for short, is a clean usable format. The adoption of XML in a user space as common as MS Word in an accessible format means that developers have a rich opportunity in XML.

The book Perl and XML focuses on the where Perl and XML meet. In asking the questions "Why Perl?", the authors Erik Ray and Jason McIntosh point to Perl's ability to handle text, strings, and regular expressions. The authors also point out in a clear and concise manner the strengths of XML as a means for structuring data.

The book focuses on working with XML using Perl. Tutorials of the basics of either language are best found in another book. The author of the book recommends Learning Perl for those people starting out in Perl. The book does not assume much knowledge of XML, so it's really an XML book for Perl programmers. If you'd like a more in depth discussion of XML, you might check out Erik Ray's Learning XML.

Surveying many conventional XML tools and applications, the book addresses big picture items such as tree processing and streams as well as specific items such as RSS and SOAP. Approaching XML from both a practical point of view and strategic point of view, the author provides detailed examples and observes which strategies work well for handling XML in Perl.

Originally, I picked up Perl and XML to address a couple of small projects where I had to deal with XML. The examples in Perl and XML were well written and provided the information I needed to try out common Perl tools for handling XML. Unfortunately, I found that XML processing in Perl was unacceptably slow for the two projects I had at hand. In a short amount of time, I hacked together a faster solution without relying on an XML parser. That said, I gleaned a great deal from Perl and XML which I imagine I will be putting to use soon.

If you're not currently working with XML, you may find yourself working sooner than you think. I couldn't more highly recommend Perl and XML for thorough treatment of the subject even if you end up hacking your own solution.

Good book, but lots of errors in the code
I liked the way this book was structured - it was a quick read over a thanksgiving family visit, and it gave a good overview of what XML is and what XML isn't, and what tools are available already in Perl to use it. I particularly liked the middle of the book, and how it dealt with trees and event streams. First there was in short intro chapter on why you'd want to parse XML as an event stream, and some simple modules that give back event streams. Then the next chapter would be a longer one on SAX - the definitive way to do event streams. Same thing with trees and DOM. It ends with some examples of real-life XML processing, such as consuming and producing RSS feeds. The book also has the best description of Unicode I've ever read, and did it with just a few pages.

What ticked me off about this book were the egregious errors in the sampe code. The very first piece of code they show in chapter 3 is a 100-line XML parser that doesn't need any support modules. The problem is that it doesn't recognize any XML because the regular expressions are wrong, which was pretty confusing for me (I'm relatively new to Perl, so I figured they were just "another way of doing it" that I didn't understand). I downloaded the examples frm the O'Reily website, and they're wrong there too - so it's not just a printing error. Worse, the example XML file I tried to test the parser on was also from the tarfile I downloaded - but it was invalid XML! (example 3.4). So I was trying to learn XML with a sample parser that didn't work, on invalid XML! This is not the quality I am expecting from O'Reilly!
(In fairness, both of these errors were in the online errata, but I'm not sure if they were corrected in the 7/04 reprint)

There are other errors in the code too - so be sure and check back with the errata page if you're going to seriously use the code. If they'd run their sample code beforeprinting, I'd probably give this book a better rating.

Good Overview Of XML And Supporting Perl Modules
I have wanted to learn about XML, but I found the pure XML books dry and too theoretical.However, putting XML in the context of something familiar, i.e. Perl, made it much more accessible.This book gives a nice overview of XML parsing using event based and tree based parsers that are available as Perl modules.The book presents SAX and DOM standards compliant modules as well as modules with more Perlish interfaces, e.g. XML::Grove and XML::Twig.It discusses the pros and cons of event vs. tree parsing of XML as well as a few advanced technologies such as database integration and SOAP.The only knock I have on the book is that the examples are a bit contrived and do not show how to solve meaningful problems.

Nice overview but lacks in useful examples
Unfortunately, this book suffers from the same affliction that most programming books suffer from. There are absolutely no useful code examples in the book. Yes, as an experienced engineer, I can substitute my own code where the book prints to the screen or searches for monkeys, but hey, I paid for my ticket, sometimes I'd like to be told exactly what to do. If I wanted to figure out everything on my own, I wouldn't have purchased a book in the first place. ... Read more

Product Description
The only book to address using cache to enhance and speed up Web application development

• Developers use Apache, MySQL, memcached, and Perl to build dynamic Web sites that store information within the MySQL database; this is the only book to address using these technologies together to alleviate the database load in Web development
• Covers each of the four systems and shows how to install, set up, and administer them; then shows the reader how to put the parts together to start building applications
• Explains the benefits of a base perl library for code re-use, and provides sample applications that demonstrate in a practical way the information covered in the previous chapters
• Examines monitoring, performance, and security, with a problem-solving chapter that walks the reader through solving real-world issues

  ... Read more

Product Description
Scripting has become an enormously popular method of managing and maintaining Windows NT and 2000 networksas evidenced by the success of Windows NT Shell Scripting, which has sold over 30,000 copies in 2 years. Simpler than programming, yet allowing greater complexity and utility than packaged network management tools, scripting is now the tool of choice by many of you network administrators. Perl is yet another powerful element of the scripting arsenal, yet since it has been ported to the Windows environment, very little information has been published on how to employ this extremely effective tool. Win32 Perl is so powerful that it can accomplish virtually any task that you may want to perform. Dave Roth, prolific creator of Win32 extensions, is prepared to share his unique insight into how these tasks can be accomplished and provide scripts that can be immediately employed. This book illustrates how Perl can automate many current mundane administrative tasks. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Win32 Perl Scripting: Administrator's Handbook
This book was excellent.The seller was prompt and the book was in exactly the condition promised: excellent condition.This is a great book seller and the book was just what I needed.

Great book
If your looking to automate tasks on windows, and don't want to learn VBScript, this book is great for someone familiar with perl programming.

Essential Resource for any IT library
This book is just awesome in that it covers different Windows libraries from Perl.The material is rather advanced in both usage of Windows libraries and Perl language usage.The topics are organized in common administrative areas.

I felt the ADSI and WMI coverage was just really brief; perhaps I just want more of this good stuff.I definitely hope this chapter can be expanded in a future edition.

One thing that was amazing is that Roth demonstrates how to investigate the LDAP schema of Active Directory, which is rather useful when you need to search for properties, and need to know what those properties actually are.Nothing from Microsoft that I found, documents how to do this for VBScript; I did find some rather scary C++ code that alludes this functionality, but Roth not only demonstrates it, but shows how it can be used.

Anyone serious about scripting and Windows administration should snatch this book like yesterday.It will undoubtedly be an essential resource for any IT department.

Hope for Perl UNIX Programmers on Windows
Recently I was given the task of writing some Perl scripts to manipulate processes on a Windows server. I've been writing Perl scripts on Solaris and Linux for some time, but had no idea where to start on Windows.

One of the scripts needed to find a process by name. If the process wasn't running the script needed to start a new instance and send out an e-mail to notify the support team. Using Roth's book I was up and running in a matter of hours. Prior to that I had spent days combing the Internet looking for tips on digging into the bowels of Windows (not a pleasant image) with Perl.

Roth gives you multiple ways to tackle a problem, but voices his opinion on why you might want to choose one method over another. However, at times he makes assumptions about your knowledge of Windows which can lead to frustration. His section on WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) is very brief for such a complex subject for example.

I wouldn't recommend this book for someone new to Perl, but if you are familiar with Perl and need to write scripts for Windows you will find Roth's book useful indeed.

Not worth it
Looks like auther has copied and past some scripts from internet and published book. I would not try this book at all.I had no chice but to give one star but it is not worth it. if u want to learn perl for windows search on internet you will get better information. ... Read more

Product Description

Learn to build web applications with Catalyst, the popular open source web framework based on the Perl programming language. The Definitive Guide to Catalyst: Writing Extendable, Scalable, and Maintainable Perl–Based Web Applications is a definitive guide to Catalyst version 5.8, which will be released in 2009. This book contains

• Training materials for new and experience programmers.
• Worked examples and cookbook–style recipes of common web application programming tasks
• Fundamentals of web application design and best–practice application style

Customer Reviews (7)

Incremental to the POD documentation, but disappointing.
I've used Perl for about ten years, and have experience with all of the "pre-Catalyst" frameworks and helpers (from CGI.pm to CGI::Application to dalliances with writing my own and trying Jifty).I've also used Rails and read several books on it (most of which are disappointments).

Unfortunately, I found this guide a disappointment as well.Most of the book seems to be structured around a few "examples," the largest of which is a translation app from English into "Lolcat."The problem with such an app as an example is that it could readily be done in a dead-simple, several-line CGI script (hell, even a one-liner could probably do it), so it requires a certain suspension of disbelief that one should be using stashes, chained dispatch methods, templates, and the like.Why not a normal CRUD type app as an example?Boring, yes, but to-the-point and more likely to be illustrative of the tools and their best applications.

The conversational "flow" of the book is distracting, as well.I understand that a more tabular or outlined form for making specific information easier to find could render it hard to read "straight through" as a book.But the sheer volume of information, and diversity of scenarios, make it unlikely that anyone will read it straight through and make equal use of all parts.Far better to organize the content more rigorously by function -- for example, the best and best-structured chapter by far is the chapter on dispatch (it gets to borrow for its prose structure from the flow chart on page 168.Less in-depth meanderings into such adjuncts as DBIx::Class and Moose, but more on how (if at all) such outside modules must interface / play nice with the Catalyst core.A chapter on errors.A chapter on logging.A chapter on templating.

The index is a mess and lazily put together.Under "log", only one entry: "Logging, in Catalyst, 7."(Are you serious?who wrote that index entry?Logging, comma, IN CATALYST?!? SERIOUSLY??)For "error:" "error handling code, changing to output errors to the log, 104-105."Nothing for "exception" (fair enough, as Perl properly has none), but under Perl's equivalent, "die:" "die, using for error handling, 156."WTF?Finding these three sections shouldn't be an Easter-egg hunt.WTF would be wrong with:

error
using "die" ... 156
logging ... 104-105
see also *log*

log ... 7
errors ... 104-105


I'm rooting for Matt & co., and I'm a fan of Catalyst.But this book needs a reworking for its next edition, and it needs an editor (the typography, too, is underwhelming).It's not that the team that wrote this isn't smart enough, or that they don't know the subject well enough.It's merely that they need to structure, structure, structure, and clarify, clarify, clarify.Looking forward to second edition, guys.

Great book on modern Perl, Catalyst
This is a great book not only for Catalyst but also for modern Perl. Perl usage has evolved over the last years, and this book covers techniques and modules that are the most useful as of 2009.

Perl 5 core has been stable for quite some time. However modules and usage have evolved. Even if you don't plan to use Catalyst, read this book for the peripheral knowledge the book pulls in.

For example, I was pleasantly surprised to see nginx mentioned as a potential Web server to use. This to me meant that the book is not a quick job done by an author gathering materials over the web, but a labor of love written by somebody who has hands on experience with the modern Web.

Presentation of the example code in the book could be much better
I am very familiar with both Perl and web development, but found that I couldn't read this book when away from a computer.For some odd reason they chose to print very little of the surrounding code and instead just tell you were to insert code.This means you can't get an idea of what is going on unless you are actually looking at the code on your screen.For me, this made the book too hard to follow.

Definitive Guide to Modern Perl Development
Catalyst is one of the most interesting projects to come out of the Perl community in the last few years. Originating as a fork of the Maypole web framework, Catalyst has grown into the de facto standard for building web application using Perl. Its power and flexibility make it a great choice for many web-based projects.

But often great power and flexibility goes hand in hand with complexity. I've used Catalyst in simple ways on a couple of projects but I had always suspected that I wasn't getting everything that I could out of the software. What I really needed was a good book that explained the best way to get the most out of Catalyst. With this book I think I've got what I was looking for. The book is written by two core members of the Catalyst team. They obviously know exactly what they are talking about and lead the reader confidently through the complexities of Catalyst.

Catalyst, like other well-known web frameworks like Django or Ruby on Rails, uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. This book doesn't assume that you are already familiar with this pattern and chapter 1 explains the underlying concepts in some detail. It also takes time to compare the Catalyst way of doing things with CGI applications and to compare Catalyst itself with other Perl frameworks like CGI::Application and Jifty.

Chapter 2 gets you started by discussing how to install Catalyst. This can be difficult as Catalyst requires a large number of other Perl libraries to be installed, and this section explains the easiest way to do with by using Perl's built-in features. This chapter also contains an introduction to Object Oriented programming in Perl using Moose. This is indicative of the authors' dedication to promoting modern Perl best practices and it's a topic I shall return to later.

Chapter 3 moves on to writing a simple application in Catalyst. Once again the authors' interest in best practices is evident as the application is not only written using Moose, but also has a comprehensive test suite. The application built in this chapter is pretty simple and some corners are cut in order to get something written as quickly as possible. These shortcomings are addressed at some length in chapter 4 where the application is rewritten in order to make it easier to maintain and extend.

Having written an application using Catalyst's built-in development web server, you will next need to deploy it. Chapter 5 takes a detailed look at your options for deploying Catalyst applications on a range of popular web servers.

The next two chapters look at two important parts of the Catalyst framework. Chapter 6 looks at database models, concentrating on the use of DBIx::Class - the most popular database abstraction layer used with Catalyst (and, indeed, with Perl itself). Chapter 7 looks at Catalyst's dispatch model - how a Catalyst application decides which of its method need to be called to respond to a given request. In earlier chapters I felt that some of the details of the dispatch model had been rather skimmed over, but this chapter more than makes up for that.

Chapter 8 looks at another vital part of modern web applications - that of authentication and authorisation. Catalyst has a number of plugins which makes these activities as easy as I have seen in any web framework. Chapter 9 looks at web services - both how to consume external services in your application and how to make a web service API available to users of your application. The latter becomes ridiculously easy with Catalyst.

If there is something that you don't think that Catalyst can do for you, then you'll find Chapter 10 useful as it examines a number of ways to extend Catalyst's behaviour. There are already dozens of add-ons and plugins available for Catalyst, but this chapter gives clear instructions on how to add to this collection.

Chapter 11 is a useful cookbook of recipes that will help you be more efficient in your use of Catalyst. Some of them solve common problems that you'll come across when writing applications but another, more interesting, section talks about ways to just become a more efficient developer. Many of these (for example, using Perl::Tidy and Perl::Critic) are general development techniques that aren't specific to Catalyst. Finally, chapter 13 looks at Reaction, which is a higher level framework which is based on Catalyst.

One of the problems with writing books about a project like Catalyst is that in the early days of a project, things can change very quickly. Sometimes so quickly that a book is out of date before it is published. I think that Catalyst has now settled down from the intense development cycles of the last few years, so this book will be relevant to Catalyst users for quite some time.

I'm convinced that Catalyst will be a useful tool to add to my collection and that this book will be very useful while I'm getting myself up to speed with writing applications with Catalyst. It's also very likely to be useful as a reference long after I'm familiar with how Catalyst works. If you're looking at writing a web application and are looking for a framework to use then this book should convince you to add Catalyst to the list of possibilities that you consider.

If you're a Catalyst user or a potential Catalyst user then you don't really need me to tell me that this book will be well worth buying. But there's another group of people who I would highly recommend this book to - and that's everyone who is currently programming in Perl, even if you never go near web developement or Catalyst. The reason for this seemeingly bizarre recommendation is easy to explain. Perl has been changing a lot over the last five years. The basic syntax remains (mostly) the same, but a number of new tools have been introduced that every Perl programmers should be looking at. Perl books don't get published as frequently as they used to and this is (as far as I know) the only book which emphasises new Perl tools like Moose and DBIx::Class. There is a whole new Perl movement out there called Modern (or Enlightened) Perl and this book is the best introduction to this movement currently in print.

The application development methods discussed by the authors of this book are the ones which will define good Perl development practice in the coming years. If you have any interest in how you should be developing Perl applications then you should be buying this book.

Informative & Substantial
This book is probably a bit over my head at this point, as I have only written 100 or so scripts over the past year and a half, but it has proven to be a very informative introduction to web application programming with Catalyst.Of particular interest to me was the philosophy behind Catalyst.I felt the book did an outstanding job of not only telling me why Catalyst is a great tool, but also showing me why.I've also been impressed by the consistency in various messages concerning the use of Catalyst:There is a learning curve, it is not an 'out of the box' solution or panacea for web development.As I've heard Mr. Trout say on several occasions, "RTFM"!It is extremely informative as well.I wonder if the Perl Mongers will embrace this tool??? ... Read more

Product Description
While there are dozens of books on programming algorithms, never before has there been one that uses Perl. Using the algorithmsexplained here, you'll be able to carry out traditional programmingtasks in a high-powered, efficient, easy-to-maintain manner with Perl.This guide assumes a basic understanding of Perl syntax andfunctions, but not necessarily any background in computer science.The authors clearly explain the reasons for using various classicprogramming techniques, the kind of applications that use them,and -- most important -- how to code these algorithms in Perl.Topics range in complexity from sorting and searching to statisticalalgorithms, numerical analysis, and encryption.If you are an amateur programmer, this book will fill you in on theessential algorithms needed to solve problems just like an expert. Ifyou've learned algorithms in other languages, you will be surprised at how much different (and often easier) it is to implement them in Perl.The authors include the editor of The Perl Journal and the master librarian of CPAN; all are contributors to CPAN and have archived much of the code in this book there.Amazon.com Review
Written for readers with at least some Perl programmingexperience, Mastering Algorithms in Perl delivers a solidlibrary of algorithms written in Perl for business and mathematicalcomputing. From data structures to cryptography and more advancedmathematical algorithms, this book provides a worthwhile guide toextending Perl's coding capabilities.

The best thing aboutMastering Algorithms in Perl is the scope at which it coversthe universe of algorithms while refraining from getting bogged downin academic detail. Besides basic data structures--a lynchpin of bookson algorithms--the authors provide dozens and dozens of algorithms forsorting, searching, and doing mathematical computations of allkinds. While they discuss "Big-O" notation and assume a generalfamiliarity with math, they don't overwhelm the reader. (You can evenborrow the code without needing a math degree to understand it.) Thefocus is on efficient, reusable Perl subroutines written and compiledby three Perl experts.

Standout chapters include extending Perl'salready powerful string processing abilities, game programming, andcryptography. Generally, the authors achieve a good mix of moreadvanced (and less well-known) algorithms, along with thebasics. Chances are you won't need to use all the dozen or so sortingalgorithms presented here, but the authors include them all, just incase. As a reference and tutorial, readers can pick and choose whatthey need for real-world Perl development.

There hasn't been a bookdedicated exclusively to Perl algorithms prior to the publication ofthis one. In all, Mastering Algorithms in Perl fills a usefulniche by compiling a powerful library of Perl algorithms that will beuseful for anyone who works with this programming language, whether inbusiness or academic computing. --Richard Dragan

Topicscovered: Perl data types, Big-O notation, data structures, queues,deques, linked lists, binary trees, sorting and searching algorithms,game and dynamic programming, sets and multisets, matrices and graphs,string matching and parsing, 2-D geometry, number systems,cryptography (including DES and RSA), probability, statistics, andnumerical analysis. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (17)

Enjoyable, broad-ranging coverage of algorithms
This is a very accessible introduction to data structures and algorithms in Perl. It doesn't go into a lot of theory, it isn't going to answer your computer science homework, but it does give a good feel for the various applications of algorithm research.

Plus, the code is all in Perl, which is not as unreadable as received wisdom asserts. It's certainly more accessible for the interested Perl-savvy amateur than the pseudocode in Introduction to Algorithms.

Obviously, you're going to have to move onto the likes of Cormen et al, if you're really serious about this stuff. And practically speaking, yes, most of this can be found in CPAN without you having to worry your pretty little head about the mechanics. If just getting something done is your main concern, then this is not the book for you.

Plus, it must be admitted that the level of detail varies across the chapters, and some of the explanations can be opaque, even for the simple stuff. I felt I had to work unnecessarily hard to comprehend some of the material: the discussion of the A* algorithm, some of the tree-related algorithms and the section on compression all suffered from this to varying degrees. This is the sort of book which requires concentration (plus copious scrap paper for scribbling down arrows and boxes) to get anything from.

But to complain that Perl doesn't need you to write these data structures from scratch, and it isn't a suitable language for this sort of thing anyway, is to miss the point of at least part of the book. It's about communicating the intellectual pleasure of wrapping your head around thesefundamental bits of computer science, and in that respect it succeeds admirably. If you're looking for an introduction to the area, this is definitely worth getting hold of.

Accessible discussion of algorithm topics implemented in Perl
If you have ever studied algorithms and data structures, then balanced trees and O(N) notation may still be a painful memory. Also, part of Perl's strength is in its built in parsing and sorting features so why would you need to know other ways of doing the same job? If your work does not challenge Perl's features then you probably do not need this book. However, if you have no computer science background and Perl is your language of choice then this book requires serious consideration.

The book is concise and the advice given in concepts like choosing an appropriate data structure or in benchmarking your program is actually quite sound. It covers a wide number of topics such as sorting, searching, sets and matrices together with material you may not find in a data structures book like geometry, cryptography and statistics.

Your choice depends on the task at hand. If you're looking for a Perl book where you can find routines to encrypt a string or find the maximum distance between two points then this book will not disappoint. Indeed, I believe that anyone serious about programming would benefit greatly from some of the Computer Science subjects discussed and implemented in Perl that are offered in this book.

Good implementation of popular algorithms
Klowledge of algorithms and data structures is vital for effective programming, and Perl is one of the most popular programming languages around, so this book fills a long-needed niche.

If you've ever looked at "Introduction to algorithms " by Cormen et al (CLR), this book will look familiar. It covers many of the topics covered in CLR, though not in such theoretic depth. It does, however, have mountains of Perl code implementing those algorithms.

This book can seemingly have two purposes - one is to learn algorithms (as the title suggests), and the other is to understand the implementation of algorithms in Perl.

IMHO, the authors fulfilled the second part quite well. For the first part, CLR is a excellent book and is hard to better. I don't think "Mastering algorithms" explained the topics in a clear enough way to compete with CLR, but it can indeed be a terrific companion to CLR (get the first edition, used copies cost pennies). Read about the algorith m in CLR, understand it from the pseudo-code and diagrams, then take "Mastering algorithms with Perl" and learn the Perl implementation of the algorithm.

A great book on the subject
This book is a great book, not only on the subject of algorithms, but also on how to implement them in Perl.A huge number of topics are covered, from Data Structures, to Searching/sorting, to cryptography, and much more.And what I found to be among the most useful additions was that for every subject, they give you a full implementation on the subject.I've read a few books on algorithms, but this is one of the most easy to read, and definitely one of the most practically useful.Recommended for any Perl programmer, regardless of skill.

MAP makes many promises, but fails to deliver.
As a guy ( engineer not computer expert ) who uses computers everyday to help his research, I would steer you away from using Perl for any task involving mathematical concepts more complicated than addition/subtraction/multiplication and addition.

I heard this same advice before buying this book and ignored it, I really wish I had listened back then.

While MAP has some nice pictures which broadly describe the essential concepts, it will give you no idea as to how to actually implement those ideas. Further, all the code is available in CPAN ( If you don't know CPAN, check it out before going any further - at the very least install a module ) and much ( at least what I attempted to use ) appeared to be broken.

Authors of computer books are usually good about answering e-mail but these authors did not deign to respond to mine.

If you are out there, struggling to learn algorithms, I would suggest taking a good computer course on the subject. I'm 99% certain the course will be taught in C/C++ or similar language -these languages have tremendous advantages over Perl when it comes to data structures and, believe me, even as a novice I've come to appreciate them...

If you really know algorithms and wish to write a few in Perl, you can do without this book. Pick up Deitel & Deitel's 'Perl: How to Program' instead or O'Reilly's basic book ( which is good, but I prefer Deitel and Deitel ) ....besides D&D answer their e-mail. ... Read more

Product Description

The book is studded with examples, exercises, tips, and tricks gleaned from years of "speaking Perl," but it avoids being prescriptive, and his casual advice is sometimes disconcerting. He discusses white space in formatting code, but he breezes past error handling. He teaches recursion without warning that it is a support nightmare. Often he hides behind Perl's creed that "there is more than one way to do it" to avoid advocating what the newbies need: one better-than-average way to do it. Johnson cannot be both advocate of Perl and teacher of beginning programming, though he has tried: had his experiment been bolder, it would deserve wider attention within the Perl and computer science communities. --Peter Leopold ... Read more

Customer Reviews (21)

Ok for Perl learning, but not for complete newbies
It's strange that the author says he wants to teach non-programmers both programming skills and Perl knowledge, yet he introduces regular expressions, which are some of the most complicated programming concepts even to advanced people, very early in the book.There is very little in the book to motivate someone who's never programmed before, as she will surely be intimated from the very beginning by code examples, pseudo-code listings, and uses of (absent explanations of) concepts completely alien to her.

On the other hand, if the reader already knows something about programming (e.g., what regular expressions are!), and just wants an easy way to get started on Perl, she could benefit from the example-led style of Johnson.The point to keep in mind is, this is not a book for learning programming, but a book for learning Perl.As a Perl intro book, it is more relaxed than, say, "Sam's teach yourself Perl in 24 hours" and less boring than, say, "Learning Perl."I just wish the code examples were explained more clearly.

Great book for true beginner
This book does a good job of teaching "how to program" to a person with little or no experience in programming. I think it is one of the better books for green programmers. I also like the thorough explanations that teach the concepts of programming "step by step" rather than rattling off lots of code with weak explanations. This book also does a good job in not assuming you speak "computerese" by explaining a lot of terms commonly used like "scalar", "lists", "interpolation", etc. This book was a great stepping stone for me to be able to get into the meatier O'Reilly series.

Here's a couple of extracts: "Programming is about solving problems...Computers are mindless devices capable only of doing what they are told...When a method for solving a problem is reduced to a series of simple, repeatable instructions, we call that set of instructions an algorithm."
"...scalar variable, meaning it can only hold a single value."
"If you think of a variable as a storage bin with a name and an address, then you can think of a reference as a forwarding address. When you store a reference to another variable in a scalar variable, you are not storing that variable's value, but the address where its value is stored."

If you want to "understand" Perl, this is for you.
I recently got a job at a telecoms company because of my experience with linux. I have no experience whatsoever in programming and they knew that and I was encouraged to learn Perl.

I bought this book after reading many reviews on it both good and bad. It was the bad reviews that told me this was the perfect book for a beginner. I like to think of myself as a person who likes to understand why I do things rather than just doing something because thats how it has always been done. This book did that for me.

Precise explanations of Perl style, syntax and regular expressions more experienced programmers take for granted were a welcome sight. Even though there isn't really a right or wrong way in perl this book teaches you the right way to do things along with the full explanations I required to understand why I was doing something one way and not the other.

The exercises following the chapters are challenging but not daunting. They allow you to use the knowledge you've learned in the previous chapters, even if at first it seems impossible, but to quote the author, "Programming is a matter of practice."

I recommend this to all who are new to programming in general and wish to make Perl their first language. Now all I need is a book on C programming that does the same this one is doing for me.

Yes, I have not read this book completely, yet I have done 3 useful scripts for work and I'm amazing myself. Perl is making my life and my co-workers' much easier.

Do not buy if you search for CGI skills
Funny how different opinions people may have about a book here. I bought this book having read a number of praising comments and tried to use the book for my needs (elements of Perl and CGI).

First, the book gets very, very, very lengthy with the elements (well, the very name of the book is "Elements of...") and it never gets very far beyond a "hello world". Being a programmer I would certainly understand most of the stuff in tenth of the amount of
pages.

What is Perl most famous for? CGI, you might say. So would I.

This book has only 4 (four) pages on CGI programming and ONLY 20 pages about the use of modules! The book does not even mention databases!!!! As it says, it is only about the elements, not the use of the language. No CGI, believe me!!!

The index of the book is next to useless. I have searched for several keywords without successand come accross them in the text when quickly scanning for them in various contexts. Is indexing really this hard???

The book has got just about everything wrong for anybody who knows at least a bit about programming and/or is accustomed to using a normal book with a normal index.

It may be good for a rookie programmer who reads it page to page from the front cover to the end cover. I am an adult reader and want to have a book with ORGANIZATION of data.

If you are planning to write CGI programs, buy ANYTHING but this book.

As my budget was limited to one book I had to use the Internet for
tutorials which - surprise surprise - covered the same topics in a tenth of the space and included CGI programming stuff as well.

Great book to start learning Perl and Programming
This book is a great way to teach yourself Perl and Programming in general.Coming from a background as a dabbler in C and JavaScript, this book was an excellent starting point for my Perl education.I found the 3rd chapter about programming style and procedure to be extremely helpful.I would recommend this book over "Learning Perl" (the llama book) because of its clearly written style and real-worldish examples. ... Read more

Product Description

Beginning Perl Web Development: From Novice to Professional introduces you to the world of Perl Internet application development. This book tackles all areas crucial to developing your first web applications and includes a powerful combination of real-world examples coupled with advice. Topics range from serving and consuming RSS feeds, to monitoring Internet servers, to interfacing with e-mail. You'll learn how to use Perl with ancillary packages like Mason and Nagios.

Though not version specific, this book is an ideal read if you have had some grounding in Perl basics and now want to move into the world of web application development. Author Steve Suehring emphasizes the security implications of Perl, drawing on years of experience teaching readers how to "think safe," avoid common pitfalls, and produce well-planned, secure code.

Customer Reviews (3)

A Sampler of What Perl Can Do on the Web
My warning with "Beginning Perl Web Development: From Novice to Professional" is to understand what author Steve Suehring means by the word "novice." He does not mean it as a synonym for "beginner". If you don't have some degree of skill in Perl, you will be overwhelmed.

That being said, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has worked through a beginning Perl book, or several. (I've found that the best way to learn any computer language is to work through several introductory books, getting most of the examples to work on my computer.) Do like I did and read through the appendix, "Perl Basics," first. I'll admit I learned a few things, and I'd bet that you will, too. This appendix is worth the price of the book.

I don't think that anyone will become an expert (or professional) in the areas Suehring covers by reading this book. However, this is an excellent book for seeing what is out there and getting your feet wet. His section on databases led me to read a book on SQL, and I'm about halfway through another. I'm grateful for his push in that direction!

Next for me will probably be a book on LWP, a Perl module to automate web surfing. Suehring gave me a start, but I need more.

I already had some background in CGI using Perl. I enjoyed the review, though. CGI, Common Gateway Interface, is a way to go beyond HTML. For instance, I use it to read and write files on my website in response to user input.

I don't at this time have a great deal of interest in Net::Tools, that is such skills as sending e-mail from web-sites and pinging them. Nor do I see myself studying XML and RSS, Perl templates and Mason, or learning about the Apache server. However, I'm glad I read through the whole book to get an idea of what is involved.

I should include a comment that "Beginning Perl Web Development: From Novice to Professional" is a bit Unix-centric, like so many Perl books.I should also share that the source-code on the web-site for the examples is all in .tar.gz format, rather than the .zip format we Windows users are accustomed to dealing with. So if you are a Windows user, plan to do a lot of typing. Or to figure out that .tar.gz thing.

Read the whole book, appendix first. (Either now, or when you have a couple Perl tutorials under your belt.) My guess is "Beginning Perl Web Development: From Novice to Professional" will lead you to find a new area of interest or two, too, and probably different ones from mine.

The Perl Handbook for Internet Development
Perl and the Internet, especially the web, are nothing new.CGI programming and Perl were part of the early wild, wild west days of the World Wide Web.However, Perl is more than just a CGI processor relegated to handling simple email forms and other mundane web tasks.In this book the author will take you through several examples and topics dealing with using Perl for database development, XML and RSS feeds, performance monitoring of your web server, and advanced CGI tasks such as how to handle uploaded files on the web with Perl, and much more.

Each section goes over a concept, introduces the module you will be using to accomplish the task, shows you the source code and walk you through it.In addition, tips as well as things to avoid are listed throughout each example for things to watch out for, or for common programming pitfalls to avoid with Perl.Sections themselves are broken down into topics that group concepts such as separate topics on XML and RSS feeds, CGI, Performance Monitoring and Web Templates.

This is a good book for the Perl programmer with some skills beneath his or her belt.It helps you take the simple Perl you may be using on your website today and help develop it to use all the power and functionality of Perl.

Perl programming for your Internet needs
The focus of this book is on interacting with the Internet using Perl.It assumes some very basic knowledge of programming such as the concepts of scalar variables, arrays, if/then/else, and similar items.If you are not familiar with these items in a Perl environment then it is still all covered pretty well in the Appendix.The first section of the book contains information on working with CGI modules, databases, and interacting with the operating system for directory information, file uploads, etc.The second section discusses working with the LWP and Net::Tools.The LWP is the Library of WWW modules in Perl.This collection of modules allows you to write Perl programs that include the most common web tasks built in including retrieving web pages and submitting web-based forms.While the LWP supports various web protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and NNTP the book concentrates primarily on using the LWP with HTTP and HTTPS.The NET::Tools primarily look at working with POP3 and SMTP services.The third section of the book is about using Perl with XML, SOAP, and RSS.The following section focuses on using mod_perl to enhance performance.As a module embedded in the Apache server this allows Perl to execute faster and allows the Perl programs to access the Apache request object.The fifth and final section focuses on working with templates, and building perl based web sites with Mason.Mason is used to insert Perl code directly into an HTML page.This in turn allows for a dynamic web site with elements common to all pages but still allowing some changes based on the page being accessed.Beginning Perl Web Development is highly recommended to anyone who wants to use Perl for added functionality with your web site or to allow interaction with other web sites. ... Read more

Product Description
This book presents Perl programming with a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective for the bioinformatics classroom. The co-authors are a professor of computer science and a professor of biology who collaborate in developing software for DNA sequence analysis. A specialty of the authors is encouraging interdisciplinary undergraduate research. The book has been tested in the classroom as a text for both biology and computer science majors. Benefiting from years of teaching experience in both computer science and biology, the authors use an exceptionally friendly and pedagogically sound introduction to Perl that emphasizes good programming practices throughout. Concepts include a rich introduction to working with strings and files of sequence data, control structures, subroutines, and data structures (e.g., arrays and hash tables). A particularly unique feature of the text is the early and repeated exposure to and use of regular expressions in sequence analysis. All examples in the book are applied to biological sequence analysis (DNA analysis, Protein analysis). The full-length book is appropriate for majors in either computer science or biology and especially relevant for new interdisciplinary courses involving students from multiple disciplines. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

great first perl book
I really disagree with the negative reviews here. This is a GREAT book for the biologist who is making their first foray into perl programming. Maybe a professional programmer would take issue with presentation format -- but as aPhD. biologist with little programming experience - I can tell you that this has been a wonderful resource for me. I worked through the book cover to cover while simultaneously writing some programs for my own work. I feel very comfortable with the overall logic of the language now and ready to take on more complex texts.

In addition, the book is well-written and includes a great deal of interesting background on both molecular biology and programming. Frankly, if I were teaching a graduate course in this area I would not hesitate to take this as a textbook. The writing is clear and the progression of subjects logical. It would hold students' interest, certainly.

Excellent interdisciplinary text for bioinformatics
I used Perl for Exploring DNA (PEDNA) for an undergraduate course in Bioinformatics last spring, and have adopted it once again for this fall. Our course is cross-listed and co-taught by our college's CS and Biology departments, and students who register come from the same variety of backgrounds. I searched for a long time to find an appropriate text to support the CS content in the course, and despite my initial reluctance to use Perl (my preferences would have been more for Ruby or Python), on the strength of the PEDNA approach adopted this text. Things worked out very well, and I couldn't be happier with the results.

Why PEDNA, then? The truth is, the language doesn't matter as long as it supports the goal of teaching computer science and biology students to speak each other's language and participate mutually in the process of problem solving and algorithm design. A text that assumes the reader has a programming background can be intimidating to a reader who does not, and this was my concern with most Perl texts I surveyed. Similarly, a text gentle enough for programming novices that teaches Perl tends not to possess the desired bioinformatics content for our course, and runs the risk of losing the interest of its readers with a computer science background.

Amid this despair of self-inflicted and conflicting goals for our course, and just in time before the semester began, the PEDNA text was published. After quickly reading this book from cover to cover, I realized it was almost perfect for my needs--I say *almost* because it uses Perl, but I've since come to terms with this choice, primarily on the strength of the Perl presentation, and only secondarily on the wide-spread adoption of Perl in the bioinformatics community. PEDNA focuses upfront on strings, regular expressions and the desire for biologists to find patterns in DNA data, but uses pattern-matching for words in an English dictionary as an analogy to bring non-biologists on board.

Throughout the text, Perl is introduced in the context of the history of biology, including important people, the questions they asked, the problems they worked on, and their solutions. While students are writing their first programs, the emphasis isn't on Perl but on the problem being solved. Information about the greater Perl community, and wisdom from Larry Wall is provided, but a discussion of the choice of language makes it clear that what the reader learns in PEDNA is readily applied to other programming languages.

What is marvelous about PEDNA is it's presentation of regex syntax and semantics using the transliteration (tr), substitution(s), and match (m) operators. Uniquely, Regex is presented and emphasized from the very beginning in PEDNA, and I can affirm from its use in the classroom, successfully. Searches and string manipulations that can't be tackled with these operators alone motivate the introduction of other Perl language features, including assignment statements, conditional execution, and loops. The authors throughout advocate and demonstrate a lovely, well-documented coding style. Later, subroutines, arrays, and hashes are introduced, at a point when these more sophisticated programming abstractions might be better understood by novice programmers. Most of the wonderful shortcuts and tricks Perl is noted for are not readily accessible to novices, and they are not included in PEDNA. Likewise, the decision was made to present one way, and not many ways to solve the problems presented.

This book alone will not turn the reader (especially not a Biologist) into an expert Perl programmer in its 276 pages, nor does it claim to do so. But in its brevity PEDNA keeps its promise, introducing its diverse intended audience to Using Perl for Exploring DNA. For those whom this book excites and who want more, references are provided, along with the encouragement to continue collaborating across disciplines to ask and answer questions about DNA.

No DNA exploration, poor introduction to Perl
This book was disappointing.Bioinformatics is a hot topic in the Perl world, so I was looking forward to a book that would get me up to speed on the happenings in that community.Unfortunately, the book doesn't contain any actual bioinformatics content; "DNA" is used as a guise to explain some trivial string manipulation in Perl.

The book's approach to teaching Perl is also rather odd.An excessive amount of time and prose is wasted on extremely simple concepts, like printing a newline.The only explanation that's needed is that 'print "something\n"' prints "something" and then starts the next print statement off on a new line.This book spends three pages and four exercises on this topic alone while glossing over important topics like the CPAN, BioPerl, hashes, etc.

Another oddity is that the book is littered with sidebars about some "softer" aspects of perl and its community.These mini-articles are ignorant explanations of the Perl community that discourage good programming practices like code reuse and involvement in the larger community.(The community is Perl's greatest asset, after all.)There are also "best practices" boxes that often are "worst practices".

Anyway, to summarize: you won't learn much about Perl from this book (and what you do learn might be wrong and harmful), and you won't learn much about DNA or bioinformatics either.

I look forward to a second edition that has been through some technical review by both Perl and DNA experts.

Great beginner guide to Perl
"Perl for Exploring DNA" should have been named "Beginner Perl for Exploring DNA" instead.That sums up the scope and level of detail in the book.I think as a compromise between teaching Perl and using Perl for DNA analysis it succeeds.In fact I would recommend it to beginner Perl programmers interested in text analysis over most other beginner Perl books in the market.Complex data structures are explained well, though late in the book.

I can appreciate the formidable task of trying to present Perl to biologists.There are many ideas and techniques that come naturally to someone trained in computer science or engineering, but which are arcane or counter-intuitive to everyone else.Something like CPAN, to address a previous review of the book which mentioned that CPAN was not prominent enough, seems painfully necessary to a programmer but requires a good understanding of many aspects of Perl (including the CPAN shell).It's not easy to present these concepts, especially if the audience is biologists who are more worried about that experiment they left running overnight than how to force install a CPAN module.

I found the sidebars interesting, the code examples understandable, and the book well written.I think there are particular tasks in text analysis that this book addresses very well in its pursuit of DNA-oriented Perl training.As a general guide it's only part of the necessary material, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

Best Introduction to Bioinformatics Perl Programming
Having been assigned the task of starting a three-class bioinformatics programming intensive at WIT two years ago, I took graduate classes in statistics, chemistry, biology and other topics and finally reached the point of teaching the Intro to Bioinformatics to my undergraduate students (junior/senior CS majors).
I researched every available resource and had chosen a combinitation of texts with which I was not completely satisfied.Then I got a copy of this text and had the bookstore send the others back.
The shortcoming I observed in my graduate courses is that they discussed biology or statistics in one class and Perl in another and never the two together.This text does not take that rather obvious shortcut. When my students finished the introductory discussion of the central dogma, they understood both it and the programming patterns that support its study in bioinformatics.

We expanded on the code in the text to automate Blast and Clustal and other meaningful tasks where it is necessary to have a tool like Perl to connect workflow tasks.My students left with an understanding of Perl in the research environment, and enough of an understanding of Biology to apply what they learned.

Now that I have taught an undergrad bioinformatics course, I get copies of new books from publishers on this topic. I have not seen any reason to change the required text since this is the only book published that meets my needs. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (15)

A trashing of the first edition ..........
This is a blatant misrepresentation of the excellent first edition of this book: Advanced Perl Programming.It's as if they published a 2nd edition of GoF Design Patterns but it was written by the Three Stooges and contained a rambling account of Moe, Larry, and Curly trying to implement an HTML parser.If fact that would have been a better book than this!Most of this book is filled with lists of parsing modules but with no coherent thread of discussion about how to use these modules to do anything besides trivial parsing of simple documents!The only reason this gets 2 stars is due to the very first chapter which is a decent discussion of "advanced techniques" such as introspection and a very brief discussion of perl internals.However after that you can use the rest of this atrocity to wipe your ass with......

Excellent reference for the serious Perl developer
This book truly lives up to it's title - this is a book for advanced developers who have a solid understanding of not only the Perl language but of higher level computer science concepts.

While there are some intermediate topics and short introductions, this is not a book to learn theory -- this is a book to show you how to take the theoretical concepts you've learned elsewhere and apply them to Perl, and to understand more of the internal workings of the language.

more a guide to CPAN than to the Perl language
In his preface to Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition, Simon Cozens says that the focus in Perl programming has shifted, since the first edition, from techniques to resources.Rather than write really good new code, authors rely on the CPAN to find existing code and use that to solve the unoriginal parts of their problems.To cater to the discerning Perl programmer, then, the book has been completely rewritten.Instead of covering the parts of the Perl programming language that are often unexploited by more novice hackers, APP2 focuses on providing an overview of some of the major solved problems in Perl, and the modules that provide some of the solutions.

Only Chapter 1, "Advanced Techniques," bears much resemblance to the previous edition of APP.It covers subject matter closer to the language than to the modules involved: globs, CORE::, objects, B, and compilation.Each subsequent chapters discusses a common programming problem, shows off a few existing solutions (in the form of code on the CPAN), and sometimes demonstrates how to put those existing solutions to use.Among the topics covered are parsing, templating, serialization, unicode, and testing.POE, Inline, and Acme also get a chapter each.

Simon's writing is, as always, lucid and easy to follow.He provides good example problems, and he builds solutions that tend to do a good job of selling the modules on display.I must admit to feeling compelled to go do more with POE and some of the Lingua:: tools, after finishing their respective chapters.

In the end, though, I felt unfulfilled.While APP1 was not one of O'Reilly's best Perl books, it delivered what it promised: advanced techniques for writing Perl code.What APP2 delivers is a guide to avoiding the need for advanced techniques.It will save you from needing to use the strangest bits of Perl, not show you how.(The back cover quotes Andy Wardley as saying, "This book of spells goes a long way to unlocking those secrets [of advanced Perl code.]"I think, rather, that it just teaches the incantations.)

Perhaps my disappointment is predicated entirely on my incorrect expectations.If this book had been called "Leveraging the CPAN," I'd probably consider it a great success.You may, instead, be interested inIntermediate Perl or Mastering Perl.

A very different beast to the first edition
As other reviewers have noted, there's not a whole lot in common with the first edition of this book, either in feel or content. It's rather questionable whether this merits being called a second edition. Something like 'Problem solving with CPAN' would be a more accurate title (then again, perhaps it's just as well I don't work in the publishing industry).

It does still cover some of the material of the first edition, such as globs, closures, AUTOLOAD, the Perl class model, and some Perl internals, but it's all been compressed into one chapter.

The other chapters discuss various subjects using CPAN modules and gives some insight into how the material from the first chapter was used to solve these problems. A wide variety of issues are discussed, including serialization and object relational mapping, natural language parsing, templating and unicode. Some superficially similar material could be found in Perl Cookbook, but the discussion here is deeper (and more up to date), there's very little overlap.

Exactly how much you get out of the book will probably be dependent on how well you know the innards of CPAN and how interesting you find the topics. I liked the parsing and natural language processing chapters a lot, and the chapter on inlining code from other languages was diverting; conversely, I can't bring myself to find Unicode even remotely stimulating, and the POE (some sort of event-based framework) chapter didn't do much for me. The testing chapter is a solid addition to the material in Intermediate Perl, and I picked up some pointers to modules to check out, but it didn't feel all that advanced.

This is a book that fits in quite nicely with Intermediate Perl and Programming Perl -- it cleans up a few niggling details not well discussed in the former book, without having the intimidating heft of the latter, and also provides a wide ranging overview of several topics and the CPAN solutions for them. As such, it will bring an intermediate programmer up a few notches.

Already advanced Perl programmers may be disappointed, and those hoping for an updated version of the first edition will definitely be out of luck, but if you know what you're getting, and evaluate it on those terms, rather than what the title suggests, I think you'll enjoy it.

Very disappointing
This book was slated to come out for a long time before it actually did, and I naturally assumed that Simon was working on something ambitious and that it was taking him longer than he planned. I bought it sight-unseen, but quickly discovered it was more of a tour of CPAN than an in-depth book deserving of the title Advanced Perl Programming. I know from his blog that Simon was wrapping up his life to go be a missionary in Japan, so now I think the book was late because he was working on *that* project after he had agreed to write this book. Just speculation.

It reads more like an article on Perl.com or in the Perl Journal, and could easily have been several articles spread out over a few months. I have to wonder if he started the book with the idea that "advanced" means "knowing about useful modules on CPAN" or if the idea came to him sometime after it was clear the book was running late.

Regardless, consider looking at it if you see it in the store. It's not without its value, but I can't see paying for a book that mostly says, "Here's someone else's work to check out." An advanced book ought to be getting into -- well -- advanced techniques, useful info that's hard to come by, something that isn't ALREADY AVAILABLE ELSEWHERE. ... Read more

Product Description
Situates Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite as a Neoplatonic philosopher in the tradition of Plotinus and Proclus. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

no negatives
This is a very fine book -- clear, clear, clear -- which is practically unheard of in this realm.The first chapter alone is worth the cost of the book.It is not an easy read, but that only means that it must be taken slowly -- not to untangle bad writing or vague thought, but just to work through the astringent arguments.What we await now is a decent ACCURATE translation of the Areopagite.

Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite
Eric D. Perl's 'Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite' provides us with a summation of that sacred doctrine which took on the epithet 'Neoplatonism' and the particular contribution of the two sages Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius. Perl's work attempts to show how Pseudo-Dionysius and Plotinus set out to articulate that which defies articulation, namely the nature of the One, or God. In the first chapter Perl clears the ground for further doctrinal elaboration by explaining what Plotinus means by the One, the Good, or Pseudo-Dionysius by God, and makes the point that the One isn't simply transcendent and non-delimited, but even beyond non-delimitation, which in turn explains manifestation. In the second chapter Perl moves on to explain, often in the words of Plotinus or Pseudo-Dionysius, how the One seemingly becomes the many. Later chapters go into further detail about the Sovereign Good, or the Beautiful, as representative of the One, or God, in the domain of Being and existence, the nature of evil and the metaphysical explanation for its apparent existence, the hierarchy of Being, epistemological considerations, and so forth.

The work is written in the style of a metaphysical treatise and while sparing no academic quality it doesn't read in the tradition of dry analytic treatment, focusing on where Plotinus lived, or what kind of sandals he might have worn. 'Theophany' is a study of the metaphysical principles which constitute Neoplatonism--which cannot be thought of as a religion, but as a means of understanding religion as such in the domain of ideas--as well as exploring the reception of these principles into one of the three great Abrahamic traditions, Christianity. It is this quality which has made Neoplatonic metaphysics so important and influential not only to medieval Christian philosophy and mysticism, but also to medieval Islamic philosophy and mysticism. I can think of no better work which in a single volume conveys the founding principles of Neoplatonism, outlining its fundamental tenets, and defending it philosophically from the many misrepresentations which inevitably abound, in such a succinct and coherent manner. It is not an entirely easy read, not because the author fails to give adequate expression, but because the ideas conveyed are those of the most subtle and sublime available to men, always skirting on the edge of ineffability. One must approach a work of this nature with the attitude of a contemplative, not the modern academician who seeks to accumulate information so as to analyze and sort according to dubious criteria.
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