Randal Schwartz's Perls of Wisdom

I really enjoyed this book - I haven't had to write Perl consistently in years, but programming, ultimately, is programming, and the book shows clear thinking the whole way through. Many of the problems tackled aren't big issues anymore, of course, but it's still a great read. David Berube Berube Consulting

It's amazing how much Perl knowledge is crammed into some people and Randal Schwartz has more than his fair share! His articles are concise and cogent. You might want to complain about the layout somewhat, but collections rarely fit into neat categories and these columns are no exception. While quite a bit of this makes use of tools and techniques that I have not found use for yet in my work, it has made me think about implementing a few things for my own personal joy. And by pawing through the examples and the code, I picked up a tidbit or two that I had not thought of or considered before, especially in Section 5, The Webmaster's Toolkit. I can't wait to try some of it out! If there's to be any complaint, it's that some articles (as the author admits) have had their core ideas superceded by newer additions to Perl. It might have been nice to find addenda to these articles, showing some updated coding, rather than having it left up to the imagination. Still, it's not enough of a complaint to rate this as anything less than a 5-start masterwork.

Randal Schwartz is PERL. He is the PERL man. I know PERL very well, but even I learned a lot from this great book.

Isn't it nice to have something on Perl that doesn't start at the beginning? Schwartz is one of the best known proponents of Perl and he offers expert advice in this book. It is a collation of what he regards as his best essays. These appeared over the last 10 years in columns he wrote for Web Techniques, Linux Magazine, Unix Review and Perl Journal. For Perl programmers, it's useful to have these essays in easy reach, as opposed to thumbing through your back copies of those magazines. The essays are grouped into broad categories. For those involved in web applications, you might turn to the chapters on CGI and on HTML and XML. Though I do wonder a little about the former choice. Nowadays, CGI tends to be deprecated, in favour of JSP or ASP approaches. Mainly because CGI coding turned out to be so dreadfully awkward. Granted, Perl helped mitigate some of this, but even so, the demand for Perl CGI scripts might have fallen since the 90s.

I'm a big fan of Randal Schwartz - his "Learning Perl" undid all the confusion that the Camel book had given me and let me go back to that to get more out of it now that I understood better. This is a big pile of some of Randal's best columns from various magazines. Tips and tricks, lucid explanations, detailed examples and always fun to read. I made the mistake of looking over the table of contents - it drove me crazy because I just couldn't decide what I wanted to look at first! Finally, I just dove in and enjoyed myself. If you have been a Perl fan from Day One, and always subscribed to all the right magazines at the right time, you would have been able to read all these origibnally. I did see some of these, but I missed most, because I was a latecomer to Perl itself and because of bad magazine timing. It doesn't matter - I have them now.