Data Munging with Perl

As a DBA, I bought this book to enhance my data manipulation skills with Perl but I found so much more in this compact book. David Cross provides many excellent code examples and explanations for common, non-database data manipulation tasks. For example: working on delimited and fixed-width text files and managing complex data structures in perl with array and hash refs. David has excellent communications skills as his examples and explanations taught me much about Perl that I did not previously understand completely. I also found the Chapter 4 on regular expressions to be one of the best and most concise. The only downside of this book is that I wish it had more pages to read! Regardless, it's a must-have perl book.

After reading this book I rewrote a pretty massive postscript pasrsing and munging system that I was having a lot of trouble with and felt like I did it the _right_ way. If you follow the author through his examples and actually read the book (which I was able to read almost straight through) I think that you will find yourself with a more long-view approach. And I think that makes this book valuable. And admit it, every time you read throgh a regex chapter you get a little more in the old noggin...

This book, written by Perlmonk (www.perlmonks.org) David Cross, is an excellent, easy to read, and easy to follow guide into what Perl does best: Data Munging. For those who don't know, Munging Data means taking data from one format and putting it into another. Perl excels at this, and the author shows you the how and the why.The author gives you enough information, and background to start working with the more advanced Perl functions like map, grep, pack, unpack, etc. It is possible to write Perl without ever having to use these modules, but David Cross shows you how they are more effective, more powerful. This book will expand your Perl vocabulary by leaps and bounds.I know that some people would say that the book is too thin, and it is thinner than many computer books today, but the thickness of a book does not determine it's merit. Effective Perl Programming by Joseph Hall and Randal Schwartz is often cited as one of the best Perl books ever and it's thinner than this one.If you are a junior to intermediate level programmer, and you want to improve your Perl skills, pick up this book. You won't be disappointed.

Dave Cross's new book, published by Manning, which means it has a figure from an old guide to native dress of the peoples of the world on the cover instead of some kind of animal, tells everything you need to know about using Perl for what it is most suited for: manipulating data.Starting with the source/filter/sink theory of data manipulation and demonstrating every tip and technique with clear and efficient examples, without severe digressions into mythological whimsy, this book would make an excellent second text on the Perl language, or a suitable first for someone who is good with programming languages.Many of the techniques contained in it are of "trade secret" quality; they are the sort of write-the-number-of-gallons-of-paint-it-took-to-paint- the-room-on-the-back-of-the-light-switch-cover practices that until now had to be learned or happened upon by every programmer, alone, or by example, rather than in the context of a coherent theory.The theoretical side, in which "munging" is defined and most software activity is described in terms of it, is clear enough that the book might be an interesting read for management, to answer the question "Just what is it about Perl that makes those who use it regularly so confoundedly fanatical?"If you've ever been mystified by a Perl wizard who found it easier to export the records from the fancy GUI database into a comma delimited text file and then sort and display the data with mysterious little programs rather than use the GUI's native report generator, and want to find out why, or if you would like to become such a person yourself, or if you already are such a person but would like to get better at it, this book is for you.

I was perusing the shelves at my local bookstore, when this title jumped out and grabbed me. Not only is it a unique and interesting title (Something uncommon for computer books), but it is also the most succinct description of my job, and of Perl for that matter, that I have ever seen. I am an avid reader, and in the interest of furthering my career most of my reading is work related. Normally, it takes me more than a month to read a book, though I am in the process of reading a half dozen or so at a time. I finished this book in less than a week. I couldn't put it down. The thing that is so great about this book, is that it delves into the heart of what Perl does best (And was designed to do). Nine out of ten (more like ninety-nine out of one-hundred) jobs in Perl involve taking some sort of raw data, munging it, and spitting it out to some other process. This book is about doing that, many of the different forms that that can take, and some of the many techniques that perl (and a pragmatic approach) make available to do that. While I hesitate to say that this is the best Perl book I've ever read (It's got some good competition), I can say that there is no application of Perl that I am aware of where this book and the principles it explores would not be of value. In my opinion this book belongs on every serious Perl programmer's bookshelf right next to the "Camel" and the "Cookbook".