Comments about oreilly Advanced Perl Programming:

Good Start but Not suitable for beginners

Comments about oreilly Advanced Perl Programming:

I'm not far into the book, and make no mistake, I AM learning. I'd like to give the book 5 stars for content and 0 for the examples. I had to settle for an average of three.

Having subroutines presented without the calling syntax has made things much more difficult for me than I think they need to be. For example, see the matrix manipulation functions in Chapter 2.

To make matters worse, these examples aren't in the downloadable code examples.

Comments about oreilly Advanced Perl Programming:

Nice book.

It takes the time and effort to de-mistify many troublesome spots. It integrates details from different scripting and system languages to give a very well rounded overview of state of the art. It covers

a miriad of topics, all of which add to the value of the book.

michael at favourite links.com

Comments about oreilly Advanced Perl Programming:

At first - its very good readeble and clear! It gives you necessary background for dealing with networks, databases, and GUIs, which is important for me. But if you are not much perl experienced than its not for you:-(

Kate Lea

Comments about oreilly Advanced Perl Programming:

I would have to agree that the lack of functional examples does cloud the quality of this book. The text is good, but not having functional examples leaves the complication of whether we should do what the text say or what the example does.

Now I am the first to admit that errors occur. That is what code downloads and errata are supposed to fix. Not only does the code download from www.oreily.com not fix some problems, but does not even include all of the examples present in the book.

As a learning book where you are going to read all the details, the book is good. As a "quck grab it" reference this book fails because of the errors.

Comments about oreilly Advanced Perl Programming:

A very good computer book! Notice: you don't have to read 5 chapters about 'the if-then', 'the for-next' and such stuff that normally is a drag if you ever touched a computer before.

Comments about oreilly Advanced Perl Programming:

Watch out for the Networking: Implementing RPC chapter! There are myriad errors in the code examples. Why doesn't someone review the code, and perhaps actually try to run it?

For example:

The peer demonstration (between two RPC servers) just won't work. Besides the fact that the code has a typo (new_rpc_server instead of new_server, mentioned in the errata), they each create a listening socket, supposedly to each opposite machine. That *won't* work. Even if they created a listening socket on their respective hosts, they wouldn't know who to contact for the TCP connection. The lower-level Msg library doesn't facilitate a server sending messages to some arbitrary client (as the RPC example implies).

Someone should *really* sit and go through the code.

Want another more explicit example:

BEGIN EXCERPT

sub rpc {

my $conn = shift;

my $subname = shift;

$subname = (caller() . '::' . $subname) unless $subname =~ /:/;

my $gimme = wantarray ? 'a' : 's'; # Array or scalar

my $msg_id = ++$g_msg_id;

my $serialized_msg = freeze ('>', $msg_id, $gimme, @_);

END EXCERPT

Notice that he shifts subname off the param list? Then proceeds to build the $serialized_msg with only the @_ params (NOT INCLUDING THE SUBNAME).

This is quite disasterous when the recevier gets here:

BEGIN EXCERPT

my $instant = thaw($msg);

my ($dir, $id, @args) = @$instant;

my ($result, @results);

if ($dir eq '>') {

# New request message

my $gimme = shift @args;

my $sub_name = shift @args;

try {

no strict 'refs'; # Because we call the subroutine using

# a symbolic reference

if ($gimme eq 'a') { # Want an array back

@results = &{$sub_name} (@args);

} else {

$result = &{$sub_name} (@args);

}

END EXCERPT

Notice again that he tries to shift the subname off the thaw'd @args array... Won't work, will it?!

I knew this already but for your knowledge - Don't trust ANYONE else's code. You'll pay for it with a significant loss of time.