PSDT Publications: Articles: Safe Perl

Pro Perl

by Peter Wainwright
Apress, 2005
ISBN 1-59059-438-X

Reviewed by Peter Scott

It has taken me literally months to review this book. Weighing in at a herniating 1,038 pages, it runs the gamut from "Here is a scalar, see the dollar sign?" (paraphrased) to the intricacies of IPC::Shareable and XSUBs.

The mission of this book appears to be to be the only book you could ever need to do anything in Perl. Its advertising stops short of that claim, however, perhaps because aPress realized that they sell other Perl books and that claim might appear contradictory.

Nevertheless, this book aims high. (It's also hard not to like any book that finds an excuse to mention Ecky Thump.) It fell a bit short of the mark for me in the earlier, novice chapters; I don't think its heart was in them. The number of technical and typographical errors in those chapters was much more pronounced. Again, aPress lists only one technical reviewer, and not only is there no sign of any other technical reviewers, there is no acknowledgements section at all. I've repeatedly taken aPress to task for insufficient technical review; let's hope they learn. Any Perl book, and especially one of this size, simply cannot be reviewed by a single person, no matter how gifted.

An exception among the early chapters is the very first section on configuring a Perl build from source, which provides some useful information that is seldom, if ever, covered in books.

Pro Perl hits its stride in the later, more advanced chapters, however, It has superb chapters on I/O, threading, and inter-process communication. The book is worth getting just for the lucid explanations of complex and modern topics including Unicode, I/O layers, and thread semaphores. Thanks to this book I got past my previous fear of threads and expect to use them the moment an excuse presents itself. There is enough material not in Lincoln Stein's "Network Programming With Perl" (Addison-Wesley) to make it worth getting even if you have that book.

Pro Perl is the evolution of the Wrox book Professional Perl Programming by Wainwright and about another dozen authors (as Wrox liked to do), but this one is all Wainwright's work. I haven't revisited that book to see what changed in the transition, though.

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