Re: What's missing in Perl books?

[ff]

This summer I worked my way through Perl Best Practices and learned lots. To the comment about "more examples", I'd add "and apply the additional style rules and best practices to those examples." I am now working my way through Higher Order Perl and appreciating the graspable ideas and subtle vocabulary lessons on terms that have floated around but never quite sunk in.

Two books that I'd like to see:
1. A book full of practical, workable examples of how to use Perl to automate working with MS Office software. Automation of other big PC software packages would be fine too. Throw in some .net also? Show how the code can be modeled on existing VB code, although don't assume any preexisting knowledge of VB. Illustrate use of Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, Spreadsheet::WriteExcel, Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Word', etc. Maybe some Samie? With the zillions of VB books on the shelves, you'd think that at least one Perl cookbook for MS would stand a chance, given the potential direct increases in productivity. (Dave Roth's books are good, but not exactly what I had in mind.)

2. As a transition to request #2, I still find it valuable to rummage through the Juvenile Emu book (i.e. Learning Perl/Tk, the precursor to Mastering Perl/Tk.) That book is a cookbook of understandable examples (well, if you have patience, and look back and forth, think for a bit about the implications of its examples, and look past its mistakes) that I would never be able to deduce from reading the Tk documentation directly. Yes, the widget.bat examples are vital, but a book with lots of practical examples has been immensely valuable. That's the style of Perl/MS/PC book I'd like to see.

But this is a transition to request #2: I'd also like to see a full-blown coverage of wxPerl that would teach me as much as the Perl/Tk books did. (Actually, I wouldn't say that I remember all that much about Perl/Tk at any one time; instead the book serves as my long-term memory and I'm able to script-kiddie my way around and make very useful things happen.) I've seen a couple of articles at perl.com about wxPerl and I must admit that I haven't gotten around to actually seeing or making anything work in that environment. But it sounds as though the interface you can develop won't look as old-fashioned as the ones that I seem to be creating with Perl/Tk. Again, I've achieved a lot w/ Perl/Tk and it serves my purpose, but if there was a catalyzing collection of useful examples and theory on another gui, it might prove quite useful.