Browse Books

Reviewer: W. Richard Stevens

Perl is an interpreted script language that has become a popular utility tool for some UNIX users. It is freely available and easy to install, so it has propagated widely. This book, coauthored by the developer of perl, is the first book on this language. In the preface, the authors claim that “Perl is in many ways a simple language.” That is debatable. Perl has been described by some people as a kitchen-sink language. That it is. Perl is somewhat a combination of C, the shell, awk, and sed. If you have ever written a UNIX shell script that uses awk, sed, and grep, probably in a pipeline, you could probably write that entire script using just perl. Unfortunately, perl goes farther and tries to provide everything to all users. This book, for example, describes 161 different functions that can be called from a perl program. Some are specific to perl (such as join and push), while others are taken from the standard C library (such as printf and socket). The online manual for perl is almost 100 pages; perl is not what I call a simple language. While you can write perl programs using a small subset of the language, to read and understand the perl programs that appear on the Usenet, for example, you will need to be proficient in perl. Chapter 1 is a 32-page overview of perl. After reading this chapter, I read a 6-page magazine article on perl, which I found to be a far better introduction [1]. This chapter can easily confuse readers who are unfamiliar with perl. The first chapter should have been a gentle introduction to perl, and not an overview of many detailed features. Chapter 2, “Practical Programming,” is followed by chapter 3, “The Gory Details.” Chapter 4 describes each of the 161 functions provided by perl. Chapter 5 shows how to perform common tasks with perl, giving 44 different pieces of code that you can lift and put into your program. Chapter 6 contains 35 “Real Perl Programs.” All the examples from the book are available electronically using FTP or UUCP, which is nice. One must be careful when reviewing a book like this to separate the language from the book. I am disappointed with the language because I do not see the need for a kitchen-sink super-language to replace some of the existing UNIX tools. I am disappointed with this book, as I found the early chapters hard to read and the made-up examples in those chapters hokey. Chapters 5 and 6 are the best part of the book and will be of most interest to perl users. Another complaint I have about this book is its cutesy tone. The authors appear to go out of their way to interject humorous sayings and jokes every page or two. These grate on the reader very quickly. Every page of the glossary contains an entry with a cute sentence. The tone of the entire glossary makes it almost useless if you are really trying to look up the definition of a term. The book was printed on a 300-dot-per-inch laser printer and it shows. The type has a rough, jagged appearance, with many adjacent characters touching. This typography gives the book the appearance of a Xerox copy and makes it hard on the eye. It is unfortunate that publishers are producing books today using 300 dpi laser printers. If you are a perl enthusiast, you will want a copy of this book, as it is the definitive reference for perl today. If you have heard of perl but have not used it, I doubt this book will convince you to use it for everyday tasks.