Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason

I am using Mason for about a year. Then I saw the Mason book. My first tought was: "Why should I buy a book about Mason - The online documentation is excellent...?".But even the introduction chapters of this book gives you new ideas how to get things done. Starting with the second half of chapter 4 every Masonsite developer should take a close look. He will find a in deep discussion about every Mason feature - and more (e.g. The Bricolage-CMS-Appendix).I my opinion there is no discussion "to buy or not to buy" this book. The only question is "when". On the one hand this book can be a bit boring for "new" Mason user and as mentioned before the online documentation is very good. On the other hand if you have your first mason-site done and read this book you will have very likely the urgent desire to rewrite some code.But this is a common perl problem: "There are many ways to get things done."I dislike the "Example" chapter. One of the big advantages of Mason is the possibility to seperate perl-code and HTML. This ist not very well done within the example-site.Conclusion: This book is not needed to get in touch with Mason althought usefull - but if you are really starting to deploy a site I strongly recommend this book.

Apart from being clear and well-written, this book is also the sum of all the knowledge of the Mason community, written by two of the developers of Mason themselves.If you already use Mason, it's a must have.If you are new to Mason, try it first (it isn't difficult at all), then read the book.From my point of view this is an excellent technical book.

As a longtime mason user (2 years, private and commercial use) I didn't have to think about buying this book. Dave Rolsky and Ken Williams, both core developers, introduce you to the concepts behind HTML::Mason and its many features which really make the life of a web developer way easier.... Even if you're already familiar with mason this book will serve you as an excellent reference. If you haven't heard of mason yet and you're into web development and Perl is your language of choice you should also definitely have a look at this book and mason in general.

Far from being just a reference, this book explains the conceptual framework behind Mason. The main idea of which is creating reusable components or building blocks to generate each element of your web site. This simple but powerful idiom is extremely useful in creating both small and very large dynamic web sites.The book is aimed at intermediate to advanced Perl programmers, although a bright beginner could pick the material up with a little help from the Mason community's very helpful mailing list. This book is not a tutorial. Instead, the authors devote a long chapter (chapter 8) to the analysis of a fully functional web app with full source code. I preferred this approach however because it helped me focus on the application as a whole rather than silly pedantic examples that lack context.Before reading this book, I had some experience working on a site that used a "home-brewed" templating system, but all the while I knew there had to be a better way. After reading through the first four chapters, I was able to build a rather sophisticated site and have been quite pleased with both Mason and this book. I fully recommend it.