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.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 51 Ratings

nice breadth of topics - 2004-10-19
Reviewer Rating:
The book does a nice job of explaining some of the obscure areas of Perl. Each chapter is summarized by showcasing the strengths and weaknesses of Perl with Java,Python,C++,TCL. This is a good refresher book for intermediate level Perl programmers. It was definitely a fun read. I think O'Reilly is readying a second edition.

Best way to learn references - 2003-12-14
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Greate advanced topics - 2008-08-22
Reviewer Rating:
I have found this book to be a great help in solving real-world customer problems. It gave me the insights and concepts needed to be effective in developing production worthy code.

a most impressive and far-ranging opus - 2007-10-03
Reviewer Rating:
I find myself returning to Srinivasan's work time and time again. I'm a professional EE and CS type with more than 20 years' experience working in the guts of OS kernels, DBMS kernels, networking stacks, compilers, interpreters, window managers, etc., etc. There's always something to be learned from a fresh reexamination of this opus. It certainly will be over the heads of many readers, but don't be discouraged. If you're willing to put forth the effort, I promise you will widen your perspectives and deepen your understanding and appreciation of the power of Perl to solve variegated, intricate systems programming and text processing tasks.

Interesting in parts, outdated in others - 2007-07-15
Reviewer Rating:
From the perspective of 2007, this book suffers from not being all that advanced. Also, some of the examples, particularly in the opening chapters, suffer from being a bit meaningless, e.g. code like $spud = "Wow!" -- er, right.

That said, the opening chapters do contain some pretty useful material which wasn't present in The Llama and which you wouldn't want to slog through The Camel for, including good stuff on references, closures, typeglobs, the symbol table, tied variables and persistence and serialization. There's also an introduction to OO with Perl.

The middle part of the book contains 50 pages on Tk. Useful if you need it, I suppose. But is this advanced?

The last part goes into detail in getting Perl to talk to C, and the internals of Perl. The latter is pretty interesting in a geeky sort of way, and definitely qualifies as 'advanced'. Not many other books about go into this level of detail.

The first 150 pages of this book maintains its relevance for the most part, although much of it (e.g. references and objects) is no longer considered advanced, and you can find discussions elsewhere, e.g. Object Oriented Perl or The Alpaca. The section on Perl internals is probably still of use if you're into that sort of thing. Elsewhere, however, the march of time and reliance on CPAN modules has reduced the vitality of the material.

Worth picking up on the cheap for the earlier chapters.

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Programming

Sub-Categories:
Programming > Perl
Perl > Advanced Data Structures
Perl > Database Interfaces