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Reviews of this product:
Interesting in parts, outdated in others
From the perspective of 2007, this book suffers from not being all that advanced. Also, some of the examples, particularly in the opening chapters, suffer from being a bit meaningless, e.g. code like $spud = "Wow!" -- er, right.
That said, the opening chapters do contain some pretty useful material which wasn't present in Learning Perl and which you wouldn't want to slog through Programming Perl for, including good stuff on references, closures, typeglobs, the symbol table, tied variables and persistence and serialization. There's also an introduction to OO with Perl.
The middle part of the book contains 50 pages on Tk. Useful if you need it, I suppose. But is this advanced?
The last part goes into detail in getting Perl to talk to C, and the internals of Perl. The latter is pretty interesting in a geeky sort of way, and definitely qualifies as 'advanced'. Not many other books about go into this level of detail.
The first 150 pages of this book maintains its relevance for the most part, although much of it (e.g. references and objects) is no longer considered advanced, and you can find discussions elsewhere, e.g. Object Oriented Perl or The Alpaca (Intermediate Perl). The section on Perl internals is probably still of use if you're into that sort of thing. Elsewhere, however, the march of time and reliance on CPAN modules has reduced the vitality of the material.
Worth picking up on the cheap for the earlier chapters.
This book unlocks undiscovered 'Perl Doors'
If you think you know a bit about perl after reading through 'Learning Perl' - then this book will open your eyes to a whole new method of working. Written in a fresh and easy to read format, the author gets straight to the point with well chosen code snippets. It won't show you how to write complete 'flashy' programs, but it will train you into a more methodical and rational habit. A recommended book if you are hungry for more, or constantly stare at perl scripts and think 'Why did they do that?'
Everything you wanted to know, but were too confused to ask.
Very easy to read; well thought out examples; excellent coverage of topics such as network programming, persistence and OO, as well as some of the more esoteric aspects of Perl. In the space of just 5 minutes reading, typeglobs and my/local finally made sense. From basics such as data-structures, to in-depth areas like Perl-internals, this book spans quite a broad spectrum, and does it rather well, with each chapter building on the previous one.
Excellent buy - the book you'll come back to.
Like many Perl coders I've got a fair few perl books, including the cookbook. However this is the one I keep coming back to time and time again. If you want to know how to do OO programming, network coding build TCP servers, database manipulation etc, then this is the book for you. The cookbook gives you stuff to copy and paste - this book allows you to create your own unique and new recipes from scratch.
More essential the more familiar you are with it
Wasn't impressed with this book at first; but once you've started wandering around it, it gradually starts to come off the shelf with ever increasing frequency. If you're already a supreme Perl obfuscator, you probably won't _learn_ much from this book, but it will definitely become a much valued resource. And you'll be surprised what you can learn from it. If you're a perl newbie, this is a great foot-in-the-doorstep to understanding what Perl is really for and how best to use it for some of the supreme time and effort savers. Took me a while to get there, but I swear by this one now :)
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