PERLS

As an intermediate Perl programmer and a relative newcomer to network programming, I found Part 1, The Basics, to be pure gold. Dr. Stein's easy-to-follow writing style helped me to finally understand elusive concepts like fork, pipes and sockets.

As the book progresses, it gently builds into more and more advanced network topics. When I hit Part 4, Advanced Topics, I knew was in over my head. Yet, I now have a great reference for the future when I need/want to learn how to play with Broadcasting, UDP servers, etc.

One of the most valuable aspects of this book is his coverage of such a multitude of Perl modules, helping the reader to understand the each of modules' basic API in a straightforward manner.

This book is worth every cent.

This is one of my favorite Perl books. It really serves what it says it will. It covers a great amount of Perl coding, but like the title says, goes into a lot of networking code, functions and so on. For Perl network programming, you really should have and use this book.

This book is excellent. This is one of very few books that the author really takes time, has a good plan to write a book and have good understanding of the subject.

I read many computer books that are just repetitive so it can make the books thick enough to look like a 'good book' (May be this is what US raaders like). I try my best to avoid those books. Those books do not say much in hundreds of pages.

But this book is not that kind of book. Every pages are worth to read. It is quite easy to follow. (I do know a bit of TCP/IP from reading other books before I read this book.) E.g. Stevens TCP/IP books. Unfortunately he died and he won't be able to update those great books.

Some authors are not professional, they just copy here and there. Then they put everything together. Those are terrible books to read. Those terrible books explain some simple concept again and again and take up hundreds of pages that can be done in half of volume. It is not just wasting the readers time (time is money) but also wasting the resource (trees)! Even most college textbooks are that way. Sometimes it is even worst since they know you won't haave much choices!

I seldom to give 5 stars. This book does deserve 5 stars.

You will enjoy this one if you like networking.

It's a sad reality, but the vast majority of the JavaScript and DHTML available is ugly, hard to, read, inflexible, poorly structured and full of kludges... This makes a cookbook written by such a talented technical writer as Goodman more welcomed than ever, his writing style is, as always, pleasant and engaging, and his attention to browser compatibility issues worth a special mention. Unlike many other cookbook I read in the past, I really enjoy all the discussions that goes along with the recipes, this isn't only a book you may want to open in search for a solution, read it, use it wisely and it may turn itself into a great learning experience

The JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook is about using javascript and css to create dynamic user interfaces for your web application. Each "recipe" starts with a statement of the problem. This is followed by the solution, which includes the code to make it run. After the solution section, a discussion
section follows. The discussion section includes explanations of why the code works and various alternatives.

The book is broken up into chapters and each chapter consists of recipes that relate to the main topic of the chapter. For every chapter, there is an introduction, which is a very good summary of the DHTML topic. Just reading the chapter introductions would give a high level overview of DHTML.

The recipes are practical solutions for problems that a developer could actually encounter. There are not flashy recipes that are useless. The recipes consist of simple solutions to complex solutions to application problems. The book could be used as a reference to solve a particular problem that you have or the book could be read, especially the discussion sections, to understand how to solve problems with DHTML. The only drawback to using the code for a recipe is that some recipe built on top on other recipes and you need to find the previous recipe.

In summary, I would recommend this book for any client-side web developer.

Review
In order to be proficient in a technology, you need to have a solid reference manual for it. Often this need can be filled very well with the "Nutshell" series by O'Reilly. But if you're like me, you also want to have a good source of examples and explanations of how to do basic things. This book fills that role extremely well for JavaScript and DHTML.

Danny Goodman is well known for his JavaScript Bible. The JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook complements that title to show both beginners and experienced developers different ways to use the language. As someone who isn't quite as adept at JavaScript as he should be, I find this book invaluable in giving me code that I can immediately use and build on. Between the working examples and a good technical reference, you can go far.

Each section in the chapter presents a problem, a solution, and a discussion of the issue. You're told what browser versions will support this approach, and you are also pointed to other sections in the book that relate to the same issue. It's a useful approach to presenting the material that gets quick results. Goodman also includes JavaScript subroutines that accomplish functions that are commonly needed but aren't something you can do in a couple lines of code. Great code to use for your own applications.

For Notes/Domino/Websphere developers, all the information in this review applies. If you are getting started in web development, get this book along with a good JavaScript reference book. Between the two of them, you will have all that you need to start producing solid web applications.

Conclusion
I highly recommend this book for both JavaScript/DHTML beginners and pros. The beginners will learn how to effectively use the languages, and the pros will pick up a few tricks that they didn't know before.

Over the last few years mod_perl has become a serious force in web development. If you're building a web site to run on an Apache server and you want to write the code in Perl, then you're going to want to install mod_perl on your server too as it's the best way to avoid many of the performance issues with traditional CGI. It's taken a while for publishers to wake up to the fact, however, and there haven't been many books in the shops. It looks like this will be the year that this changes. A number of mod_perl books are about to be published and this is the first.

This book uses the popular "cookbook" approach, where the content is broken down into short "recipes" each of which addresses a specific problem. There are almost two hundred of these recipes in the book arranged into chapters which discuss particular areas of mod_perl development. In my opinion the cookbook approach works much better in some chapters than in others.

It's the start of the book where the cookbook approach seems most forced. In chapter 1 problems like "You want to compile and build mod_perl from source on a Unix platform" provide slightly awkward introductions to explainations about obtaining and installing mod_perl on various platforms (kudos to the authors for being up-to-date enough to include OS X in list list). All the information you want is there however, so by the end of the chapter you'll have mod_perl up and running.

Chapter 2 looks at configuration options. It tell you how to get your CGI programs running under mod_perl using the Apache::Registry module which simulates a standard CGI environment so that your CGI programs can run almost unchanged. This will give you an immediate performance increase as you no longer have the performance hit of starting up a Perl interpreter each time one of your CGI programs is run. This chapter also addresses issues like caching database connections and using mod_perl as a proxy server.

We then get to part II of the book. In this section we look at the mod_perl API which gives us to the full functionality of Apache. This allows us to write Perl code which is executed at any time during any of the stages of Apache's processing.

Chapter 3 introduces the Apache request object which is at the heart of the API and discusses various ways to get useful information both out of and back into the object. Chapter 4 serves a similar purpose for the Apache server object which contains information about the web server and its configuration.

In chapter 5 the authors look at Uniform Resource Indentifiers (URIs) and discuss many methods for processing them. Chapter 6 moves from the logical world of URIs to the physical world of files. This chapter starts by explaining the Apache::File module before looking at many ways to handle files in mod_perl.

The previous few chapters have built up a useful toolkit of techniques to use in a mod_perl environment, in chapters 7 and 8 we start to pull those techniques together and look in more detail at creating handlers - which are the building blocks of mod_perl applications. Chapter 7 deal with the creation of handlers and chapter 8 looks at how you can interact with them to build a complete application.

Chapter 9 is one of the most useful chapters in the book as it deals with benchmarking and tuning mod_perl applications. It serves as a useful guide to a number of techniques for squeezing the last drops of performance out of your web site. Chapter 10 is a useful introduction to using Object Oriented Perl to create your handlers. Whilst the information is all good, this is, unfortunately, another chapter where the cookbook format seems a little strained.

Part III of the book goes into great detail about the Apache lifecycle. Each chapter looks at a small number of Apache's processing stages and suggests ways that handlers can be used during that stage. This is the widest ranging part of the book and it's full of example code that really demonstrates the power of the Apache API. I'll just mention one particular chapter in this section. Chapter 15 talks about the content generation phrase. This is the phase that creates the actual content that goes back to the user's browser and, as such, is the most important phase of the whole transaction. I was particularly pleased to see that the authors took up most of this chapter looking at methods that separate the actual data from the presentation. They have at recipes that look at all of the commonly used Perl templating systems and a few more recipes cover the generation of output from XML.

Finally, two appendices give a brief reference to mod_perl hooks, build flags and constants and a third gives a good selection of pointers to further resources.

This is the book that mod_perl programmers have been waiting for. The three authors are all well-known experts in the field and it's great that they have shared their knowledge through this book. If you write mod_perl applications, then you really should read this book.

As someone who's been writing code for mod_perl-enabled Apache servers for six years, I can honestly say that this book is one of the best single references on a topic I've seen. Much like the "Perl Cookbook" and "Writing Apache Modules in Perl & C" wrapped into a single volume (with all the recipes tightly focused on mod_perl). I've recommended it to everyone I know who writes for this platform, and it is rarely more than 2-3 feet from my keyboard. Covering the subject as deeply as sub-classing the Apache classes in XS (Perl's layer of glue for writing and linking C code), there's very little about mod_perl you won't find in the book.

This book hits the nail on the head. Excellent technical information, much much much more than your typical book that is just regurgitated man(1) pages. Geoff and company delivery a book that shows you the power of mod/perl, why you should use it, and why it is great for what your doing. This book is part of my standard fare.

I found this title extremely useful in learning perl mainly because it teaches you how to do 1 thing in 5 different ways. This allows the reader to chose whichever method they are most comfortable with. The book is also very well organized and explains everything in a language that even the best programmers have trouble with- English! Within a couple days, I found myself writing my own scripts in Linux.

The first Perl book I've seen that is truely great for beginners, great for people who are already Perl programmers, has a lot of example code, is a great reference, has a good reference section, and also seems to not leave any important details/sections out. The fact that it is very well organized/divided is definately a plus! Any person who wishes to learn Perl or have a great reference, MUST have this on their bookshelf.

In a line, buy this book if you want to start programming in perl

I started reading this book 5 days ago, and I already consider myself a perl programmer. I am a computer engineering student at Stevens Institute of Tech and my main focus of study is network security from a programmer standpoint. After a couple of days reading this book, I could already create simple client/server applications. In addition, I learned how to handle files in numerous ways, and how to work with their content "you will be amazed how easy this is done in Perl" and even formating text, creating DBM Database files etc. Object oriented programming is very well explained and finally CGI scrips are also very well presented "with lots of security warnings." I would give this book six stars if I could since it does its job VERY well! My extensive programming experienced really helped me in the reading process, but the language and examples are so clear that even newbies in programming could assimilate the content easily!!! You can contact me at rarmente@stevens-tech.edu if you have further questions.

As far as books that claim they will teach you Perl in any number of days / lessons, this book is by far the best. The lessons, exercises and on-line quizzes are structured very well to make sure you understand the material in the lesson. The lessons are short and sweet and cover only a few topics at a time, which makes it easy to master a lesson at a time.

The examples in the book are effective and can be used immediately to help you solve those simple real world problems. The book does fall short in helping you easily conquer more complex issues quickly. However, the online resources are great for helping you address these problems.

When I read other people's reviews, I always wonder what kind of background these people have in programming. Well, here is my background: I know HTML, JavaScript, C++, a little bit of Java, DHTML, and databases. When I found out that I had to learn Perl, I was scared because, after 4 years of college, that is the first language that I had to learn completely on my own. However, this book made my learning experience as easy as possible. The book provides very good explanations, a lot of examples, and an EXCELLENT reference section. I think this is one of the best programming books I have read so far.

I've read and use most of the Perl books out on the market today, but none comes close to getting you going well with Perl as does Jon Orwant's book. I still use it as a reference today, but it is the best any money can buy for learning Perl. I'm back buying another copy because I loaned mine to a friend and I miss it so much that I want to make sure I'll always have a copy handy. My old copy is so well worn that a fresh copy is enticing also. As for extras in the book: the quizzes are great for testing your understanding, and someone has done a great job at proofreading this book -- I don't know whether that person is at the Waite Group or is Jon himself, but I know that anytime I have questioned an answer, or a script, or anything in the book I have always found the book to be accurate on closer inspection. It is very much like the Camel Book in being authoritative -- what Jon says is Perl Gospel Truth - if I had to pick two Perl books, I'd pick this one for learning and the Camel Book for ultimate reference. Jon's book should be rated a 5 and a half star - this is the best that it ever gets!

Brief summary and Review:

Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story is a wonderful book of how a family stays together through thick and thin. The story is about one Jewish family's struggle for survival during the Nazi occupation of Europe. The family includes Ruth Blumenthal, the mother, Walter Blumenthal, the father, Marion Blumenthal, the daughter, and Albert Blumenthal, the son. The Blumenthals lived in concentration camps for six years which included Westerbork in Holland and the notorious concentration camp of Bergen-Belson in Germany. Conditions in these camps were so terrible that nearly half the camps population died of disease, starvation, exposure, exhaustion, or brutal beatings. The book received its name from young Marion's search to find four perfect pebbles of almost the same size. If Marion could manage to find these four pebbles, she felt that it meant her family would remain whole and be strong enough to survive the Nazi reign. This game kept young Marion's mind on things other than dead bodies lying around, the rumbles of her starving tummy, and the want for her family and life to go back to normal. This is a great story about the importance of family and diversity. I would encourage everyone to take this book home with them today and experience the true account of one family's struggle through the Holocaust.

As a junior high reading teacher and being extremely interested in survivors of the Holocaust, I was thrilled to read this book. Students will readily relate to this book. The author was 5 year younger than Anne Frank, her family moved to Amsterdam from Germany when she was a small child, she went to Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen. The similarities are remarkable. Marion Lazan is an exceptional writer and speaker. After reading her book, we were fortunate enough to have her as a speaker. She is marvelous. This book is a must. Pamela Blevins

FOUR PERFECT PEBBLES is just one of thousands of such stories that mandate telling and retelling. Simply and beautifully, Perl relates one little girl's mode of survival through one of history's most heinous periods. As the author of another Holocaust book, FAR ABOVE RUBIES by Cynthia Polansky, I read everything I can get my hands on pertaining to the Holocaust. This one is a gem that must not be overlooked.

This book was very easy to follow. In the first few chapters I was already writting JavaScript with no problem at all. The book has complete working examples, and is very easy to follow. I definately recommend this book.

This book provided the most straigh forward, and easy to follow introduction to Java Script I have ever seen!... Everything was made very simple, with complete code examples to view. If you want to learn Java Script, easily and quickly then buy this book!

This is simply the best learn JavaScript book I have seen. If you want to teach yourself, this book will do it. It starts with a chapter on basic HTML, for those readers who need it. Then each chapter describes a group of related techniques, such as image effects. COMPLETE code examples are given...I like that.

I had never thought of HTTP in such a broad scale before I read "HTTP::The Definitive Guide". Apparently, Web sites and Web browsers are not the only things that should come to mind when one thinks of HTTP. Flexibility of the protocol made it home for so many breakthroughs of the Internet. It's amazing that there were no comprehensive textbooks covering the topic until today.

Organizing such enormous data in a 500-line book is a challenge already. But authors managed to go even beyond. The result was a well organized, comprehensive and amazingly easy to follow book.

The book is organized into 6 large sections. Each section is split into Chapters. Wherever appropriate, authors use figures and diagrams to illustrate the point.

The first section, called "Web's Foundation" covers most of the things an average web developer may already have known. It starts off with a chapter on HTTP Overview, and covers such topics as URLs, HTTP Messages - requests and responses, connections - parallel, persistent and pipeline. Some of the highlights are HTTP versions and their differences, URL conversion algorithms and status codes.

The second section, called "HTTP Architecture", is probably the most informative section with lots of gory details. It discusses existing technologies that make things happen - players of the Web. Starts with Web Servers that actually serve the original content. Takes you step by step what exactly happens once the Server accepts the request from your browser and displays you the page. Other technologies, such as Proxies, Caching, Gateways, Tunnels and Relays are very well covered. They even talk about Web Robots (a.k.a. Crawlers) and allocate over 30 exciting pages on these both annoying and incredibly useful "creatures". The section is finished with a brief overview of HTTP-NG, also called "Next Generation HTTP".

"Identification, Authorization, and Security" is the next section, that talks about just that. Detailed coverage on Cookies, Basic and Digestion Authentication available. Walks you through the architecture of HTTPS, a.k.a SSL/TLC and algorithms used.

Fourth section is on Encoding, Internationalization and Content Negotiation.

Fifth section is on Content Publishing and Distribution. Types of web hosting and Publishing systems - all covered. Also allocated good deal of time on explaining Redirections and Load Balancing - very useful topic. Wraps up the discussion with a chapter on Logging and Usage tracking.

Last, over 100 pages of the book are all useful Appendixes.

If you really want to understand how the Web really works (I mean, really), this is a "must have" book.

HTTP: the Definitive Guide is a comprehensive view of the plumbing of the web. There are enough gory details to satisfy the hungriest of developers (it's becoming a standard reference where I work), but where the book really shines is in how it presents a coherent overview of all the elements of modern web infrastructure and how they fit together. The book is very well written in that each chapter is independently accessible on an as-needed basis, yet hangs together as a coherent whole as well. For example, I needed to get a quick (re)-education on redirection; I was able to get what I needed from that chapter quickly and easily, with the pros and cons of various approaches laid out in an easy to grasp manner. The material on caching is also particularly meaty (unsurprising given the author's backgrounds). Managers, executives and IT professionals who need to become fully "buzzword compliant" will also find this book surprisingly accessible and informative.

You think you may know enough HTTP, it's just a simple application level protocol eh? Hold your thought till you read this book. I borrowed this book from a library merely for doing some research on HTTP connection management and secure authentication. However, the more I read, the more I'm amazed there're lots of practical and interesting topics with so rich but not boring details. The book uses quite numbers of pictures to depict different handshaking protocols and complicated concepts, very easy to follow and understand. It is certainly not the HTTP specification reprint. It tells you what, why, where, and how. It is as the name suggested --- The Definitive Guide.

This book gives you very resourceful details on how HTTP works with a wild range of topics like Caching, Proxies, Gateway, Tunneling, Web Robots, Connection Management, Cookies, Various Authentication, Security, i18n, Hosting, and even Load Balancing! For example, it addresses how web crawlers work, really the inside out information, how a web crawler can back track their visited paths and what other alternatives to prevent & resolve loops & dups.

HTTP is becoming the 'operating system' for distributed applications in Internet. No doubt in my mind, from beginners, advanced users, even to researchers, will surely be benefitted from this excellent book. The authors really did a superb job. Five Stars!

The day I got this book, I turned to page 1 and started reading. Two hours later, I had made it only to page 80. Why? Because this book is DENSE and FULL of tips and tricks that will expand the horizons of the intermediate programmer. I spent a lot of time studying the numerous examples in order to soak up all the information that was being presented.

I've been programming with Perl since 1992 and teach it at a community college. And yet with every turn of the page, I learned something new. Examples:

Making regular expressions more efficient

Using map() and grep()

How to call a subroutine from inside a string

Great stuff! The techniques I've learned from this book have been incorporated into my new Perl scripts and they are shorter and faster than ever before.

I can't lavish enough praise on this book. Authors Joseph Hall and Randal Schwartz should be commended. If you have been using Perl for some time and want to hone your skills, get this book now.

Once you've gained some knowledge of Perl, this is the book that will step you up to the major leagues. Effective Perl Programming helped me make the transition from Perl Programmer to Perl Hacker. I highly recommend it for anyone with a basic or greater understanding of Perl. There are many, many useful nuggets of information and you can really just open up to any page and learn something, no matter how advanced your knowledge of Perl

As a previous reviewer said, this isn't a book for advanced perl programmers. For intermediate users, however, it is excellent. No time wasted covering the perl basics, just lots of useful tips and hacks

I read the raving previous reviews and thought this would be the CGI book for me. It wasn't. I know a bit of perl, but relatively little about cgi (I know a bit, but not much). Here are my comments:

Good things:
- I thought most of the example programs in the text were good and illustrated the points being made.
- I liked the discussion on taint

Bad points:
- I thought the examples were somewhat random and did not give me tools to attack general problems.
- I would have liked a better description of cgi.pm (perhaps I should get Lincoln Stein's book)
- I did not like the line by line format of the code. I found this very distracting and redundant. I would have preferred seeing the code and then having the authors describe the main points of the code (instead of all the trivial comments inbetween all the lines).
- I did not like the dependence on databases. Perhaps this is something most serious cgi programmers use, but storing my data in text files is sufficient for most of the applications I might use. I would have preferred a separate chapter on database and cgi (or I could just buy a separate book on this).

I'm not sure why everyone else raved about the book so much, but I didn't find it so wonderful.

This book covered everything that I wanted to learn about doing CGI with Perl. It is well-written and very easy to read. All of the example code is described in a line by line fashion, and it's described well enough that even those with only basic Perl knowledge will understand. It promotes good programming practices, and the authors share many topics and techniques that even those already familiar with CGI will learn from. It's a great book!

I'm not sure how they did it, but this book is incredible. It's not often that you find a book that can be used by a beginner and contains such intermediate/advance material. After a few chapters, I was able to finish applications that I had sitting around for months. The practical code and step-by-step explanations are great. The main text and code explanations employ the same concise, easy to understand teaching method. I am very impressed with the speed with which I was able to grasp and implement many new cgi concepts. Especially useful was the sections on using cookies, and the DBI interface. I already have 2 applications using MySQL and Oracle as a result of this book. Some projects that we were planning to implement using java and an expensive proprietary java web server and now being done in cgi, thanks to the sections on cgi.pm, mod_perl and Apache::Registry. Finally, I had plan to use a companion Orielly perl book to bring me up to speed on my perl, but there was little need since the authors did such an excellent job with explaining the perl concepts, code and cgi.