Programming the Perl DBI: Database programming with Perl: Amazon.ca: Tim Bunce, Alligator Descartes: Books

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The birth of new modules for the Perl scripting language is a regular occurrence, and the publication of an O'Reilly book about one of these modules is a sign of coming of age. Perl's DBI module, which facilitates the database-independent operation of Perl, achieves its rite of passage this month with the arrival of Alligator Descartes and Tim Bunce's excellent Programming Perl's DBI. Perl's DBI interface is maintained by Bunce and includes submodule interfaces to Oracle, MySQL, Sybase, Microsoft ODBC, and many other smaller databases. O'Reilly Perl book aficionados take note: this is the cheetah book, named for the animal that graces its cover.

Far from being a formalized how-to or man page, Programming Perl's DBI is a mini textbook in database programming, ideal for CPAN-savvy Perl programmers with little or no experience in database programming. Descartes and Bunce develop primitive notions of databases by using flat files, and they introduce relational databases with careful didactic motivation. The example database used throughout the book contains ancient sacred monolithic sites in the UK and elsewhere, of which Stonehenge is the most famous. Readers will learn about these primitive places while storing, updating, deleting, sorting, and locking their descriptors using flat files, nonrelational and relational databases, and a tutorial on SQL. The last chapters describe the peculiarities of interacting with ODBC and introduce DBI's Perl-less diagnostic shell and database proxying.

The authors use many modules--including DBI itself--that are not part of the vanilla Perl distribution, and Descartes and Bunce introduce them without explaining where to find or build them. Perl newbies with no CPAN experience may find themselves derailed early. The Storage module seems not to be available on CPAN at all (at the time of this writing). Fortunately, DBI and friends build, test, and install seamlessly under Linux/Red Hat 6.1.

At 350 pages, Programming the Perl DBI is 60 percent text--filled with highly annotated Perl code--and 40 percent appendices covering a detailed specification of DBI and 3-to-5-page descriptions of each of the 14 supported databases. Brevity is a large component of this book's wit. Clarity is the rest of it. --Peter Leopold

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This book is a must-have for the corporate systems administrator who need to coordinate projects that require multiple teams of programmers. -- Jon Holman, Unix Review, Dec 2001

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4.0 out of 5 stars still a valuable reference for multiple databases, Sep 5 2003

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"dsimpson1" (Fremont, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming the Perl DBI: Database programming with Perl (Paperback)

This book has been a valuable reference of mine for several years for web database programming projects. I bought the book soon after it was released and continue to use it - sometimes on a daily basis depending upon the project I am currently developing. I realized from the beginning that much of the material in this book came from the online documentation and have still found the book to be useful enough to stay on my A-list of reference materials. Applications like CGIScripter need to utilize up to half a dozen different databases so I have found the reference section on each database be the section I often turn to first. I have not found this info available anywhere in the online documentation. When you program and debug on multiple computers with multiple windows open simultaneously, having a reference book is often more manageable than opening another window on the computer. And for those times when I am struggling with an especially troublesome programming issue, I have found it very helpful to sit in my easy chair with a reference book like the Perl DBI book in order to research the problem. The only reason I am not giving the book 5 stars is that it hasn't been updated in a few years so it doesn't include info on some of the new DBI supported databases like SQLite.

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4.0 out of 5 stars still a valuable reference for multiple databases, Sep 5 2003

By

"dsimpson1" (Fremont, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming the Perl DBI: Database programming with Perl (Paperback)

This book has been a valuable reference of mine for several years for web database programming projects. I bought the book soon after it was released and continue to use it - sometimes on a daily basis depending upon the project I am currently developing. I realized from the beginning that much of the material in this book came from the online documentation and have still found the book to be useful enough to stay on my A-list of reference materials. Applications like CGIScripter need to utilize up to half a dozen different databases so I have found the reference section on each database be the section I often turn to first. I have not found this info available anywhere in the online documentation. When you program and debug on multiple computers with multiple windows open simultaneously, having a reference book is often more manageable than opening another window on the computer. And for those times when I am struggling with an especially troublesome programming issue, I have found it very helpful to sit in my easy chair with a reference book like the Perl DBI book in order to research the problem. The only reason I am not giving the book 5 stars is that it hasn't been updated in a few years so it doesn't include info on some of the new DBI supported databases like SQLite.

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4.0 out of 5 stars still a valuable reference for multiple databases, Sep 5 2003

By

"dsimpson1" (Fremont, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming the Perl DBI: Database programming with Perl (Paperback)

This book has been a valuable reference of mine for several years for web database programming projects. I bought the book soon after it was released and continue to use it - sometimes on a daily basis depending upon the project I am currently developing. I realized from the beginning that much of the material in this book came from the online documentation and have still found the book to be useful enough to stay on my A-list of reference materials. Applications like CGIScripter need to utilize up to half a dozen different databases so I have found the reference section on each database be the section I often turn to first. I have not found this info available anywhere in the online documentation. When you program and debug on multiple computers with multiple windows open simultaneously, having a reference book is often more manageable than opening another window on the computer. And for those times when I am struggling with an especially troublesome programming issue, I have found it very helpful to sit in my easy chair with a reference book like the Perl DBI book in order to research the problem. The only reason I am not giving the book 5 stars is that it hasn't been updated in a few years so it doesn't include info on some of the new DBI supported databases like SQLite.

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4.0 out of 5 stars still a valuable reference for multiple databases
This book has been a valuable reference of mine for several years for web database programming projects. Read more

Published on Sep 5 2003 by dsimpson1

4.0 out of 5 stars still a valuable reference for multiple databases
This book has been a valuable reference of mine for several years for web database programming projects. Read more

Published on Sep 5 2003 by dsimpson1