Re: Unwritten Perl Books: 2007 version

[Ovid]

My top choices:

AI Exploration in Perl

Perl is too slow for AI programming in general, but it's a great way to explore basic concepts and perhaps whet people's appetites.

Perl for Students

Build simple dynamic Web pages. Download music. Post to your blog. Tell the RIAA to go stuff themselves.

And while I don't know that it would make an entire book, more information about using chromatic's P5NCI would be great. It would make it much easier to use a lot of existing C or C++ code for the traditionally slow bits of Perl.

[Muggins]

I agree about P5NCI, would be nice to see more on this. There's also a similar looking thing called FFI on CPAN. I wonder how these compare/contrast?

Sadly, I couldn't get these to install on Windows XP, (a while back so I can't remember what problems were holding me up) but there is Win32::API. Also the Inline and InlineX modules are great of course.

Of course there's Extending and Embedding Perl which covers XS, a bit of Inline::C and PDL, and embedding Perl in C. But things have moved on a little.

[Jenda]

I wonder how does it differ from FFI. And which one if more likely to stay around and supported :-|

[lin0]

Hi Ovid,

Perl is too slow for AI programming in general, but it's a great way to explore basic concepts

I completely agree with this comment. However, we should not forget that using wrappers to well established C/C++ or Fortran routines can provide the benefits of an easy to use application without affecting the processing speed (see for instance PDL)

Build simple dynamic Web pages. Download music. Post to your blog...

This one would be a very interesting book, indeed

By the way, thanks for the reference to P5NCI, it looks like a very useful and interesting module I did not know about

Cheers,

lin0