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Programming the Perl DBI

by barndoor (Pilgrim)
on Jul 10, 2000 at 14:54 UTC ( [id://22050]=bookreview: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??
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Programming the Perl DBI - By Descartes & Bunce ISBN: 1-56592-699-4 Copyright 2000, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

Capsule Review A great solid book on the subject. 5 stars out of 5. Who should be interested in this book? Anyone who needs to access databases from Perl. Anyone who needs to store complex structured data from Perl.

Full Review If your like me and find that a lot of the scripts you write need to access data stored in a database of some kind then DBI is the way to get at it and this book is the one to tell you how. After a short introduction the book starts with database basics and the storage of data in flat files. It explains what flat files are good at and what they aren't. It also explains how to get more complex data structures into flat files. The book then moves on to the various hash based Database Managers that are available. Again it gives plenty of examples and shows the pros and cons of these tools. The book then plunges into an introduction to SQL and Relational databases. If your already used to these technologies you can skip this chapter as it is really just a short primer. We then get into DBI for real and start to use the objects provided by the module. Connection, disconnection, queries and updates are all covered in detail with lots of example code and details of where specific methods should be used. The DBI Shell (an interactive SQL tool which uses DBI) is covered as well as writing Database proxies. A good class reference is included as well as specific information on most of the main relational databases and their particular quirks when it comes to DBI. The book is quite new and therefore is quite up to date. I found it invaluable when learning DBI and still refer to it regularly whilst cutting code. I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who wants to harness the power of databases inside their Perl code. barndoor

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Programming the Perl DBI
by penguinfuz (Pilgrim) on Feb 06, 2001 at 07:23 UTC

    I have just bought this book two weeks ago and I must say it has really *sparked* my eagerness to learn perl.

    I had previously, not to mention casually, read through "the llama book" without trying any examples, but after reading the DBI book, I have "revisted" the llama with gusto! 8)

    Absolutely essential to my bookshelf.

Re: Programming the Perl DBI
by sheridan3003 (Beadle) on Oct 08, 2001 at 00:51 UTC
    Excellent book. It goes into some very good examples of how to build statements and how to use them, as well as explain how the parts of DBI work. It also discusses some of the performance differences between ways to perform queries.
Re: Programming the Perl DBI
by trs80 (Priest) on Feb 19, 2002 at 04:53 UTC
    I found it to be great educational material, but has not proven to be a reference source for the most part. I don't recommend it to anyone doing casual database access in Perl. If you are doing fulltime DBI based development this book presents much more value and may become more of a reference source. My use of DBI is primarily of limited complexity and haven't had need for some of the more advanced topics covered. It is however well organized with good examples.
Re: Programming the Perl DBI
by EvanCarroll (Chaplain) on Oct 01, 2005 at 01:15 UTC
    /agree with reviews

    Excellenet book:


    Things I learned:
    neat();/neat_list()
    bind_parm_inout();
    looks_like_number();
    Advantages of ODBC over DBI
    $dbi->tables();$dbi->table_info(); DBD::ODBC
    dbish
    dbirpoxy/DBI::Proxyserver
    $dbh->{RaiseError}; $dbh->{PrinterError}; $dbh->{ChopBlocks}
    Do w/ placeholders
    NAME; NAME_uc; NAME_lc; consts for *hash functions
    The list goes on...

    The moral is the DBI Does lots of stuff, so much stuff that a whole book can be written on it, and keep an excellent ratio of content to verbosity.


    Evan Carroll
    www.EvanCarroll.com
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