Perl Annotated Archives- Martin Brown

Order (or just read more about) Perl Annotated Archives from Amazon.com

This is another of those mixed feelings book. On the one hand, the concept is good: take real-world tasks and present fully dissected Perl code that solves the problem. This is a wonderful way to learn techniques that you might not have thought of, and it's useful and easy to lift code from the included CD either to use as-as or modify for your own projects.

However (in spite of one Amazon reviewer who insists otherwise), there is broken code here. I would guess most of it isn't serious, and should be easily fixed by anyone with even a little experience, but what about the new user who hopes to learn from this? Well, my advice is to visit the author's website http://www.mcwords.com and pick up the corrections- I'm pretty sure everything I noticed is fixed there. I wish, though, that authors who provide such resources would say so in big bold print all over the cover- like CHECK XYZ.COM FOR LATEST UPDATES AND BUG FIXES - but nobody does, so I can't particularly fault this author or publisher.

I'm sure that I will make use of many of the scripts here- I'm the lazy sort who would much rather start with someone else's code than write it all myself. Of course, the code has to be well written and understandable, which this certainly is, especially with the book serving as commentary.

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