'This book lives up to everything I have come to expect of the O'Reilly Nutshell series, being both technically accurate and highly readable. I would recommend it to anyone needing to extend or embed perl as well as to those wishing to move to more complex perl programming than they might be doing at the moment.' - Tom Hughes, Cvue, January 2000

Book Description

So you've learned Perl, but you're getting frustrated. Perhaps you've taken on a larger project than the ones you're used to. Or you want to add a user interface or a networking component. Or you need to do more complicated error trapping.

Whether your knowledge of Perl is casual or deep, this book will make you a more accomplished programmer. Here you can learn the complex techniques for production-ready Perl programs. This book explains methods for manipulating data and objects that may have looked like magic before. Furthermore, it sets Perl in the context of a larger environment, giving you the background you need for dealing with networks, databases, and GUIs. The discussion of internals helps you program more efficiently and embed Perl within C or C within Perl.

Major topics covered include:

Practical use of packages and classes (object-oriented programming)
Complex data structures
Persistence (e.g., using a database)
Networking
Graphical interfaces, using the Tk toolkit
Interaction with C language functions
Embedding and extending the Perl interpreter

In addition, the book patiently explains all sorts of language details you've always wanted to know more about, such as the use of references, trapping errors through the eval operator, non-blocking I/O, when closures are helpful, and using ties to trigger actions when data is accessed. You will emerge from this book a better hacker, and a proud master of Perl.

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Customer Reviews

49 Reviews

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

Average Customer Review

4.2 out of 5 stars (49 customer reviews)

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Most helpful customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars 13 year old book still has valuable lessons contained in it's pages, Mar 7 2010

Dennis Chang (Toronto, ON Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Advanced Perl Programming (Paperback)

The book is 13 years old (I know) but I'm still recommending it. My reasons are as follows:

1. author explains which features are necessary for a programming language to be considered for advanced uses
2. author describes those features and how they solve problems
3. author sprinkles comments about the trade-off between program efficiency and programmer efficiency
4. author builds from key features (eg. data references) to advanced features (eg. organization into modules)
5. author finally explains the internals of the language

To summarize, the book is excellent because it attempts to prove the hypothesis that Perl is the best language for many programming jobs. The author succeeds because of his clear explanations and examples. I still recommend the book because although 2nd ed. feels it necessary to update the content I feel that the author is not merely teaching you features he's teaching you also how to evaluate requirements.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Best way to learn references, Dec 13 2003

Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Advanced Perl Programming (Paperback)

This is one of the four critical books you need to learn Perl; Programming Perl, Learning Perl, Perl Cookbook and Advanced Perl Programming. This book provides a deep understanding of how references (pointers) can be used to increase performance. In addition the book gives you a deeper understanding about how to make better use of hash tables as data structures. The section on code generation using templates is great as well.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book, Aug 29 2003

Eric Kent (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Advanced Perl Programming (Paperback)

This is a great book.

If you want to excel in PERL programming, this is a great text.

It is written in a clear, detailed manner.

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