Programming Web Graphics with Perl and GNU Software

This book is exacly what you need for creating dynamic webpages. It covers everything from file types to advanced image manuipulation functions. This book is well written so it is easy to understand even if you aren't familiar with PERL yet. I sincerely recommend it if you are going to create graphics on the web.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I can only stand to grab data out of a text file so many times... I have never done graphics programming before and found this book to be a nice introduction. I did notice that there wasn't a lot of troubleshooting information in the book so if you are experienced programming graphics, this book is probably a waste of your time and $$$, you would be better off busting out your lazerjet and printing the man pages...Anyway, I really enjoyed this book and plan on using ImageMagick in my next project!If you want something thats a slight change of pace, give this a try!

Amazing, you really dont even need to know Perl, (though it helps:) Definitly buy it if you want to generate PNG, JPEG, and GIFs ON THE SEVER. A MUST HAVE!

This is not an art book. There are not even any color illustrations. Rather, there is uniquely definitive and comprehensive coverage of the most important freeware graphics tools useful for web development. There is a strong bias toward programmatic tools, those which can be controlled from server-parsed HTML or CGI using Perl, which allow drawing graphics interactively with the user on the fly. One example with source code is a Perl "biorhythm" calculator, where the user enters a birthdate and the web page draws a customized GIF bar chart with a sinusoidal envelope, emulating the coin-operated "biorhythm" machine at the Vince Lombardi Rest Area on I-95 in New Jersey. This basic technique can be used for charts of stock performance, server activity, and any other on-demand drawing. The ImageMagick tool, which can be run from a command line to do batch processing (such as thumbnailing) or through a Perl API, is also well covered, showing how to draw text labels onto images and do other tasks essential to good web practice. The GIMP, a web-friendly freeware clone of Adobe Photoshop, is covered primarily from the point of view of its relatively unknown Perl API, but this is not a book about the GIMP and there are better choices of books (especially those with color) if interactive use of the GIMP is your main concern. However, use of the GIMP to create basic web elements such as flaming marbles or imploding cats is covered. This book stands in a class by itself on its subject matter, and is destined to become one of the classic O'Reilly references. While it does have copious pointers to web information via URLs, the book's most serious deficiency is certainly that it is heavily tied to the current snapshot of available tools, and the freeware tool development pace will doubtlessly necessitate frequent revisions of this book, possibly as often as annually. The author is also to be commended for not flinching from discussions of technical issues where appropriate, such as image compression, interlacing, and the internals of GIF, JPEG, and PNG file formats, but these discussions are not essential to the book if the reader has little interest in technical issues and wants to get right to the cookbook graphics recipes.

I can only use an example to show how inspirational I've found this book. A Sys Admin and I were sipping cold beer in early Spring sunshine, on a Monday lunchtime. As we're both old gits, we got to talking about Veritas disk mappings and how difficult they can be to visualise (yes, I know just how sad this is). How about a web page? he asked. I was at a loose end, so I agreed to take a look. With this book's enthusiastic help and superb encouragement, by Friday in the Pub, we had a fully working intranet site which could deliver complete dynamic charted disk mappings of every machine on our entire network. Easily printed from Netscape, this single CGI/GIFgraph web tool now delivers clear condensed disk map charts in full "browser-safe" colour onto standard printer paper, displaying both mirrored volumes and all the other gubbins a tortured soul could require. This will save our Sys Admin teams hundreds of hours of tedium in the next few months, as we rebuild all of our machines. And that was only Chapter 6. This week I'll be reading Chapter 7 on the Gimp, and already I've realised whatever Adobe may like to quote me in the future for a Photoshop licence, I'm never going to have to pay it. Another brick in the wall of the propriertary monolith comes tumbling down. Rejoice.