Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Jul 12, 2004 at 16:21 UTC
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Perl and Document Formats. There has been way to little press on the fact that Perl can generate documents in every single format in major use today (and nearly ever minor format). While it wouldn't go into detail on the various templating modules, it should give an idea of what's possible.
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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.
Then there are Damian modules.... *sigh* ... that's not about being less-lazy -- that's about being on some really good drugs -- you know, there is no spoon. - flyingmoose
I shouldn't have to say this, but any code, unless otherwise stated, is untested
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by stvn (Monsignor) on Jul 12, 2004 at 18:08 UTC
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- Perl Parsing Techniques
But only as long as it wasn't just about using Parse::RecDescent (which admitedly could have its own book). Perl is so great for parsing, and most people know that, but not everyone knows how to do it and do it well.
- Large Scale Programming in Perl
With lots of good info on organizing namespaces and modules. Testing strategies, etc etc etc.
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How are these books lacking in what you are looking for?
Perl Parsing Techniques -- "Data Munging with Perl" by David Cross.
Large Scale Programming in Perl -- "Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules" by yours truly.
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How are these books lacking in what you are looking for?
They are not lacking I guess, my bookshelf is lacking :)
"Data Munging with Perl" is new to me, I had never seen that one before, but you can bet I will order it ASAP.
As for your fine book, I have to admit, I skimmed over it several times, but never looked closely enough to see all that it was about. I suppose maybe I should pick that one up as well, unless of course you have some extra copies lying around you wanna give away :)
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Large Scale Programming in Perl
I actually proposed something like this to O'Reilly last year. It would have been an overview of current software engineering best practices and how they apply to Perl. There would have been chapters on extreme programming, refactoring, design patterns, testing and many other similar topics.
O'Reilly didn't think there was an audience for it (which is probably true as there doesn't seem to be much of an audience for many Perl books right now[1]). Maybe I should see if I can knock out a few samples chapters and submit them to perl.com as articles.
[1] If my royalty statements are anything to go by :)
--
< http://www.dave.org.uk>
"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about
Perl club." -- Chip Salzenberg
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by FoxtrotUniform (Prior) on Jul 12, 2004 at 18:12 UTC
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What unwritten Perl book would you like to read?
What, besides Higher Order
Perl? How about "XS in a Nutshell" -- I've never managed
to fully wrap my head around XS, possibly due to a lack of
knowledge about perlguts.
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It's been awhile since I skimmed it, but I thought 'Embedding and Extending Perl' was basically XS in a Nutshell.
--Solo
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You said you wanted to be around when I made a mistake; well, this could be it, sweetheart.
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On subjects like this, I often turn to
Writing Perl Modules for CPAN by Sam Tregar, from the Apress. It talks about the h2xs structure, and ways of doing automated testing and so on...
Here's a
Simon Cozens review (he's a bit more down on the book than I am).
That doesn't answer the whole question though... very few professional software development environments would be based on the CPAN packaging system (it could probably be done, but would seem like a kludge). The ways people really
do it would be interesting to hear about (just as an example: is there any standard at all outside of the h2xs world about where to put test files and what to name them?
Myself, I lean toward putting the test for Modular::Stuff
in a directory named "t" located in the same place as the
Stuff.pm file, and calling it Modular-Stuff.t, but other choices are possible).
There's nothing wrong with Randal Schwartz "Learning Perl Objects" (I bought a copy to read on vacation once.) It could easily be that going through that book would be a step
in the direction of learning how to do large scale programming, but it's a pretty early step.
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by kvale (Monsignor) on Jul 12, 2004 at 19:13 UTC
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I would agree that an AI book would be useful. Modern AI fields, such as machine learning and statistical learning theory, are barely represented in the Perl world and a book including them would be useful for the new modules and module tutorials, if nothing else.
As long as we are wishing, I would like a book on Numerical Methods and Scientific Computing for Perl. Between PDL and the many mathematical modules on CPAN, I think one can make a good case for Perl as a scientific scripting language (I have done so for many years). Mastering Algorithms with Perl touches on numerical topics, but can't be considered a full numerical manual.
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++Numerical Methods for Perl.
I never got beyond college-level algebra. A perl tour of various mathematical fields would be invaluable to me: Perl For Geometers, Differential Equations Explained Using Perl, etc. would definitely help me understand some of the mysterious maths that are required background for most CS programs.
Belden, who studied Spanish and Chinese instead
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by valdez (Monsignor) on Jul 12, 2004 at 22:02 UTC
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by dws (Chancellor) on Jul 12, 2004 at 19:32 UTC
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What unwritten Perl book would you like to read?
Perl: The first 100 years
... assuming I'm still around to read it.
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books -- "Perl for the non-programmer"?
by Ovid (Cardinal) on Jul 12, 2004 at 19:40 UTC
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No one mentioned "Perl for the non-programmer." I see this for many other languages but the closest I can think of Perl is the awful "Perl for Dummies." Is this book out there? "Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web" comes close (second edition only!), but it's for a specific niche.
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Focusing on the Web, O'Reilly's Perl for Web Site Management provides an excellent introduction to Perl and Unix for people new to these things. I would recommend it over any Peachpit or Dummies book without hesitation.
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by enoch (Chaplain) on Jul 12, 2004 at 20:13 UTC
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by Solo (Deacon) on Jul 12, 2004 at 20:35 UTC
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Articles would be great, chromatic! I've heard one of the Perl Journal compilations includes a bunch of the game articles. I don't even know what I'm looking for really... I've always wanted to dig into the CPAN Games:: modules, but there are so many I don't know where to begin!
--Solo
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You said you wanted to be around when I made a mistake; well, this could be it, sweetheart.
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 12, 2004 at 16:45 UTC
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Perl & SDL that does not segfault.
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Maybe that book should have atleast a chapter about Frozen Bubble?
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As we know, it's the only one that doesn't segfault. It cheats by shipping everything it needs with it, and implements many needed features not in SDL by itself, using extra frame buffer libraries. FrozenBubble is a miracle. It's very nice, but it's astounding it even works at all. Ugly code, bad design.
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by WhiteBird (Hermit) on Jul 13, 2004 at 00:58 UTC
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The book I would like to read (or maybe someday write) is "Perl/Magic Programming". There's a limited audience for the subject matter, so I'll probably never see it, but I like the opportunity to dream.I work with Meditech, a very proprietary hospital system that is programmed in a language called "Magic". (Are any of you Monks familiar with it?) It's a difficult system to interface with, but it is possible to do some scripting into it using Visual Basic and some windows dlls. One of my goals is to write a Perl scripting interface into Magic. I suspect that if VB can communicate with Meditech then Perl should be able to as well. And I suspect Perl could do it with less code and less overhead. But since the book hasn't been written yet, I guess I'll have to figure out how to get it done and write the book myself. | [reply] |
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I work with Meditech, a very proprietary hospital system that is programmed in a language called "Magic". (Are any of you Monks familiar with it?) It's a difficult system to interface with, but it is possible to do some scripting into it using Visual Basic and some windows dlls.
I had a similar problem once, although rather than Magic
I was stuck with a rather awful (er, "beginner-friendly")
scripting language for a thankfully-mostly-forgotten IVR
system. The first project I had to write was a nightmare.
The second one was easier: prompted by the local guru, I'd
written a set of Perl scripts to translate an XML
descriptiom into a code framework. By the time I left that
job, my Perl scripts were generating all the code I needed,
as well as all of the supporting documentation and even the
test suites.
The moral of that story: if you can't write code to solve
your problems in a sane language, write code that writes
code to solve your problems in a sane language.
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by artist (Parson) on Jul 12, 2004 at 17:47 UTC
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I second the idea about Perl AI applications. Being good at Perl language, compared to other languages, and a good interest in AI has prompted me for same. Some good websites with articles would be nice too.
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 12, 2004 at 22:44 UTC
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How Perl Can Help Your Sex Life: There's More Than One Way To Do it.
Diving for Perls: Sexual Secrets From Perl Monks
Geeks Make Good Lovers, and other tidbits your local Perl hacker never told you.
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by graff (Chancellor) on Jul 13, 2004 at 03:51 UTC
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The Year's Best Perl Essays (a diverse anthology)
... kinda like "The Year's Best Science Fiction Short Stories"...
Am I the only one with a short attention span? A lot of the particular things I'd like to read regarding Perl shouldn't have to be book-length. (Maybe that's why I spend so much of my free time roaming through the Monastery, instead of reading books.)
I was tempted to say "who needs books when you have perldoc?" But I can't deny that some documentation authors seem to be less equal to the task than others, and some supplemental reading can be handy in certain cases. I couldn't read a whole book about "pack/unpack", but something a bit more "expository and demonstrative" than the description in perlfunc -- e.g. having the length of serious journal article -- would be nifty. (Mind you, I don't blame the author of that man-page section, or demean his/her efforts: I doubt I could do better on such a vast topic.) | [reply] |
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Well, you could start by reading every one of my 201 (and counting) "short stories" at my column archive. And I bet in the two months it takes you to do that (and comprehend!) I'll have done five more for your reading pleasure.
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I agree with what you say, but I just wanted to point out that recent versions of perl (such as 5.8.x) come with a "perlpacktut" document, among other new tutorials. I know it was just a random example, but my point is that perldoc does improve over time, as people volunteer to write documents that they think may be helpful for others.
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by toma (Vicar) on Jul 13, 2004 at 06:54 UTC
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I like the AI idea. I've been looking at
Fast Artificial Neural Network
Library lately.
I would also like to see something on POE.
Here are the ones that I would like to read:
- Perl Antipatterns and Refactoring Tools
- Statistical Analysis and Modeling in Perl and R
- An Enterprise Framework in Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl
It should work perfectly the first time! - toma
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by Discipulus (Canon) on Jul 13, 2004 at 08:08 UTC
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Hi Ovid
one year ago I wanted to read your CGI-course but now I have read it..
- Perlmonks idioms and snippets explained
- Perl for low access to physicals ports (crossplatform edition) (AKA perl 4 robots )
- Perl to hack MS api (dada edition)
- Perl games and 3D animation for online games
- how use Perl to work from home (Cookbook of Lazyness)
Please inform me when you have wrote one book from the list.
cheers from sunny Roma Lorenzo*
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by periapt (Hermit) on Jul 13, 2004 at 13:22 UTC
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by tbone1 (Monsignor) on Jul 16, 2004 at 12:35 UTC
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Tuesdays with Larry - The story of how a young man spends time once a week with the creator of Perl and learns Important Life Lessons (TM).
Who Moved My Script? - A guide to Perl for the kind of idiot managers who think reading a book will make them competent.
The Regular Espression Diet - Difficult to get used to, but soon you can't remember how you were able to live without it.
I'm Okay, You're Not - The psychology behind "-w" and "use strict".
The Four Camelmen - The biography of four Perl hackers at Notre Dame who overcome adversity from a sysadmin named Rocky Canute, "a true testament to the human spirit".
Much Ado about Nothing - Random thoughts from the Chatterbox.
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tbone1, YAPS (Yet Another Perl Schlub)
And remember, if he succeeds, so what.
- Chick McGee
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by zentara (Cardinal) on Jul 13, 2004 at 14:00 UTC
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I would like "The Cookbook of Practical Perl AI ".
Or "Perl, Automation, and Port Control" . Covering things like data aquisition thru ports, data logging, remote control of relays, web cams and security, X10 and Perl, reading and writing serial, parallel, usb ports, controlling external microcontrollers. Sort of the "perl Coffee Machine" on steroids. I bet Perl would have done pretty good at the "recently failed" computer controlled cross-country car race competition.
I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
flash japh
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Covering things like data aquisition thru ports, data logging, remote control of relays, web cams and security, X10 and Perl, reading and writing serial, parallel, usb ports, controlling external microcontrollers. Sort of the "perl Coffee Machine" on steroids.
There are a couple of articles that focus on home-automation and such in Best of the Perl Journal : Games, Diversions & Perl Culture. It has a bunch of good articles, and some even have been updated for this edition.
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by gwhite (Friar) on Jul 19, 2004 at 14:51 UTC
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How about Perl for High School Kids? Then we would have a decent influx of new blood wanting to program in Perl (and buy more books). Chapters on managing mp3 files, cool ways to update their blog, building their own instant messenger client and report writing search engines could get them going.
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 15, 2004 at 08:49 UTC
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"One-man sw-projects with Perl"
or
"How to earn money with Perl"
ToC
I. How to setup/extend/maintain..
- A large news website like slashdot.org
- A large service website like ebay.com
- A large inet-shop website like amazon.com
II. How to make big profits of them.
III. What to do with all the money you gained from your projects.
...
XY: Why there is no application server for perl (like JBoss).
- Reason: perl geeks fear projects outreaching a 1-liner.
Appendix: Sourcecode examples with Mason, Bricolage, ...
Before writing the book one has to solve the enigma: How could one dare to write this book without beeing damn rich.
Hihi,
Murat
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by gregor42 (Parson) on Jul 17, 2004 at 23:52 UTC
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"How to pick up chicks with Perl"
I'm quite sure it would sell at least one copy for every two monks on the site. :)
Wait! This isn't a Parachute, this is a Backpack!
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Re: Unwritten Perl Books
by r11132a (Scribe) on Jul 16, 2004 at 01:13 UTC
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Poetry Perls: The Best of Perl Poetry
This way we keep the Literature majors happy...
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