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Here's a better struts survival guide:) (Sorry for the flamebait, I've been having another frustrating day developing a struts application...)

guess it answers this question (Does Perl Have a Future?) posed by Brian d foy.

perl has some neat text processing capabilities (munging), regex, unicode and CPAN. I wonder if you can gain access to CPAN from your phone?

I purchased the previously /. reviewed Code Generation in Action from Manning for half price. So far, I am finding this book to be a pleasant ebook to read, despite it being in pdf, which is due to the writing's conversational style. There are others who are enjoying this ebook and its half price availability. I don't think I would be as pleased if I were to read an ebook of something like A New Kind of Science. ebooks will only get better and become more available.

The users are too lazy to type a couple of characters into Google

Too lazy, or too busy to take an hour experimenting with fruitless queries? Not everybody is enough of a Google master to get relevant results on the first, second, or third try. What keywords did you use in your query?

If they had been written in an object oriented language (such as C++) instead of Perl

Perl supports object orientation, and so do Lisp and Python.

There are several appendixes, including one on SWT and one on JFace. Sample code for these and other sections can be found here. It's not comprehensive, but should be enough to get you started.

In the Eclipse in Action book, Appendix D has an introduction to SWT and Appendix E has an introduction to JFace. They both have stand-alone sample programs, and you can download all the samples for free.

Link to sample chapters (2 and 8) from the book

Two sample chapters from the book are available in PDF format from the publisher's website, here.

Actually, what I would like to see is a review of the Ted Husted book Struts in Action , ISBN 1930110502. It was listed as not published yet yesterday at amazon.com, but is now listed as "usually ships in 13 to 14 days." It is available sooner at bn.com or direct from the publisher. Husted is one of the more well-known Struts gurus, and I think his book has been much more anticipated than the one reviewed.

One thing I like is that the publisher, Manning Publications, lets you buy a PDF version of the book for half price. They will also deduct the cost of the PDF version if you decide to buy the tree version later. There are a couple of sample chapters online, one about integration with Tiles and another about validation. The sample chapters I have read seem very complete and well-written.

I know this post sounds like an advert for the book, but I'm not associated with the book in any way. I'm just a Struts developer who's been waiting for a good Struts book to come along, and the Husted book looks like it might be the one.

Actually, what I would like to see is a review of the Ted Husted book Struts in Action , ISBN 1930110502. It was listed as not published yet yesterday at amazon.com, but is now listed as "usually ships in 13 to 14 days." It is available sooner at bn.com or direct from the publisher. Husted is one of the more well-known Struts gurus, and I think his book has been much more anticipated than the one reviewed.

One thing I like is that the publisher, Manning Publications, lets you buy a PDF version of the book for half price. They will also deduct the cost of the PDF version if you decide to buy the tree version later. There are a couple of sample chapters online, one about integration with Tiles and another about validation. The sample chapters I have read seem very complete and well-written.

I know this post sounds like an advert for the book, but I'm not associated with the book in any way. I'm just a Struts developer who's been waiting for a good Struts book to come along, and the Husted book looks like it might be the one.

Actually, what I would like to see is a review of the Ted Husted book Struts in Action , ISBN 1930110502. It was listed as not published yet yesterday at amazon.com, but is now listed as "usually ships in 13 to 14 days." It is available sooner at bn.com or direct from the publisher. Husted is one of the more well-known Struts gurus, and I think his book has been much more anticipated than the one reviewed.

One thing I like is that the publisher, Manning Publications, lets you buy a PDF version of the book for half price. They will also deduct the cost of the PDF version if you decide to buy the tree version later. There are a couple of sample chapters online, one about integration with Tiles and another about validation. The sample chapters I have read seem very complete and well-written.

I know this post sounds like an advert for the book, but I'm not associated with the book in any way. I'm just a Struts developer who's been waiting for a good Struts book to come along, and the Husted book looks like it might be the one.

Actually, what I would like to see is a review of the Ted Husted book Struts in Action , ISBN 1930110502. It was listed as not published yet yesterday at amazon.com, but is now listed as "usually ships in 13 to 14 days." It is available sooner at bn.com or direct from the publisher. Husted is one of the more well-known Struts gurus, and I think his book has been much more anticipated than the one reviewed.

One thing I like is that the publisher, Manning Publications, lets you buy a PDF version of the book for half price. They will also deduct the cost of the PDF version if you decide to buy the tree version later. There are a couple of sample chapters online, one about integration with Tiles and another about validation. The sample chapters I have read seem very complete and well-written.

I know this post sounds like an advert for the book, but I'm not associated with the book in any way. I'm just a Struts developer who's been waiting for a good Struts book to come along, and the Husted book looks like it might be the one.

Dead tree ver. from publisher: $44.95 +s/h
eBook version from publisher: $22.47
Dead tree ver. from B.A.M. $33.49

Publisher site is here.

If you ever write a book (it's worth trying,, just not while having a full time job as a software developer), you'll understand why books are written as if the author was asleep; I think I only got 6 hours sleep for 4 months in row, it was brutal.

I can also see your prejudice -I've read the other two ant books and I dont thing they bring enough to the table above the Ant docs. They have a better introductory guide, but once you know ant, that's no longer useful. We wrote ours assuming you have the ant docs open in a different pane of mozilla from the JDK docs, and added stuff that isnt in there. And we fixed ant as we went along when we found problems: you can guess when we wrote chapters by looking at the ant bugzilla entries.

My recommendation would be have a look at your local bookshop, sit down in a corner with a coffee and your laptop, and read through bits of it. Pick a chapter related to a project you are working on.
Up on the manning site we have posted a couple of chapters. Ch4 is about junit; I assume you know that already. Chapter15 shows how to build apache axis based web services and how to interop test against .net. In the bookshop you should also scope out ch11, Xdoclet, ch12, ch13 'xml', and maybe ch18, production side deployment. Its not often a book on java has a chapter criticising the many j2ee implementations for all being different, or operations teams who cal up engineers at 3am whenever they get an error message they dont understand, but in that chapter we do it :)

-steve

(pet peeve: books about OSS projects that dont add to the docs and whose authors didnt contribute anything to the project, not even bugreps)

For people like you they also provide the book in ebook format(PDF)(See http://www.manning.com). Good price too and a discount if you wish to go to a more tree based existance. I wish more publishers woukd do that!

We should all applaud a small publisher like Manning for doing this.

There are some sample chapters available on the book's website

I've seen a lot of comments disliking the abundance of Perl/Tk usage in DJ's book. Recently Manning Publications released Instant Messaging in JAVA: The Jabber Protocols in print and ebook. It was written by Iain Shigeoka, and is ISBN 1-930110-46-4. It's a good read and goes over the creation of both a client and a basic server in Java, plus a good deal more.

I've seen a lot of comments disliking the abundance of Perl/Tk usage in DJ's book. Recently Manning Publications released Instant Messaging in JAVA: The Jabber Protocols in print and ebook. It was written by Iain Shigeoka, and is ISBN 1-930110-46-4. It's a good read and goes over the creation of both a client and a basic server in Java, plus a good deal more.

Stephan

All I need is a motivation.

Just like when I understood the idea of inheritance and the real OO code reuse, together with the idea of moving data to the foreground and that with a good data you need simple algorithms -- that day I understood, that I have to learn Smalltalk, Objective C, C++ and OO Perl.

Today I need to know why I need to learn how to think with the functional paradigm. It's a serious problem, which stops many people before they learn functional languages.

Many years ago I was writing C programs to process text, and I could do everything that way, I just didn't realize, that there were better ways to do the same. That was before I knew Regular Expressions, egrep, sed or Perl. Now I write Perl one-liners for tasks, which used to take me days of writing C code, but I didn't know that before, because "If the only tool you have in the toolbox is a hammer - every problem looks like a nail."

So now I ask for a reason to learn the functional way of thinking. I need to know it before I actually learn them, just to have a strong imperative. Learning the new way of thinking is a long and hard process, I just want to know what waits for me at the end.

I hope someone who know that reason, will tell me and those who also need it, why it's worth the efford. Thanks in advance.

-- Your Anonymous Coward who wants to learn new ways of thinking...

Troll or not, I think there's an important point here. People's impression (and use) of a language is *hugely* influenced by the tutorials they use.

I think that most people's impression that Perl's OOP features are a bit convoluted comes from their slightly tacked-on explanation (in terms of previous Perl features) in the Camel books. Given that most approaches to large-scale projects revolve around OOP these days, that leads
to people using the wrong techniques with Perl, and getting unmanageable stacks of steaming subs.

Damian Conway's Object-Oriented Perl, on the other hand, is so good that it won me back to Perl from Python. Conway's explanations show you the subset of "ways to do it" that include "ways that scale".

It was a bit of a relief, to be honest, because while programming Python felt very worthy and clean, it was not fun. I wonder how much that had to do with how I learnt it too?

err... many Perl programmers will admit it.

Obviously, performance is rarely the prime objetive in a software project, compared to, say, completing on schedule and within budget. However, here's what a skilled OO Perl developer has to say...

From Damian Conway's excellent Object Oriented Perl:

A single method call is about 30 percent slower than a regular call to the same subroutine ... In general, it's fair to say that an OO implementation of a system in Perl will almost never be faster than the equivalent non-OO implementation, and will usually be somewhere between 20 and 50 percent slower.

I guess [anyone got any figures?] that the same might be true when trying to use any procedural language in an object-oriented fashion.

Which I did. I've found that Mr. Notebook makes a very nice ebook reader. Manning Publications has put out several of their books in PDF format.

Aww shoot... it looks like they're switching over to a new ebook format for their newer books (like Up to Speed with Swing, 2nd Edition, see the "cyberbook" link), and they're not saying what yet. This could be bad...

Which I did. I've found that Mr. Notebook makes a very nice ebook reader. Manning Publications has put out several of their books in PDF format.

Aww shoot... it looks like they're switching over to a new ebook format for their newer books (like Up to Speed with Swing, 2nd Edition, see the "cyberbook" link), and they're not saying what yet. This could be bad...

Dr. Conway is a coding fiend. A quick look through CPAN will reveal:

Parse::RecDescent
Coy
Text::Balanced
Lingua::EN::Inflect
Quantum::Superpositions

Just to name a few. He has also created a yet to be published module to write Perl programs in Latin (Lingua::Romana::Perligata)! On top of that he is a tireless lecturer.

He has also written a very good book concerning OO and Perl: Object Oriented Perl.

In fact, during this year's Perl Conference his series of talks was jokingly referred to as "Damian TV, all Damian, all the time." It would be very helpful to have Damian devote even just 1 year full time to Perl.

I hope this is enough to show you his value to the Perl Community.

I learned my Perl OO from perltoot and the O'Reilly Advanced Perl Programming book. Does this book provide much more than that?

Well, you could check out sample chapters on the Manning web-site. I also got my perl OO from the sources you mention, but I was impressed with the Conway samples and would buy the book in a minute on impulse if I could find a local bookstore that stocked it.

But I guess a large part of my enthusiasm is driven by the fact that this is a book by Damian Conway, the man, the myth, the crazed hacker, the co-author of "C++ Re-syntaxed", the author of the Coy module, and so on. Seriously, I figure I'd give the guy like $10 if I ever met him in person, so why not just buy all his books and let him have the royalties instead?

Now the Everything engine is very flexible, and Slash lets you get a lot done, there's really nothing out there like Zope for Perl.

At the risk of a shameless plug, let me just say that that's why i started Jellybean.

--

You can browse parts of the book online at http://www.manning.com/Johnson/index.html

For your reference, Damian Conway's book Object Oriented Perl can be found here:

http://www.manning.com/Conway/index.html

Andover's self-referential integrity is still intact.

• Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C by Lincoln Stein and Doug MacEachern.
• Damian Conway's Object-Oriented Perl.
• Elements of Programming With Perl by Andrew L. Johnson.

• Most Improved Kernel Module: FreeBSD's Linux emulation module.

• Unsung Hero: In descending order:
  • Kirk McKusick, for his more than two decades of tireless service and personal sacrifices for our community.
  • Gurusamy Sarathy, Perl project release manager, responsible for bringing fork(2) to Microsoft ports of Perl and a million other things to make Perl code truly robust and portable between Microsoft and Unix platforms, a true Godsend for those of us forced to co-exist on both.
  • Malcolm Beattie, for trailblazing the Perl-to-C compiler, the Perl external byte-code interpreter, the first Perl/Tk implementation,threading in Perl, and safe blackbox compartments for mobile agents in Perl.

• Best Newbie Helper: Mike Stok from comp.lang.perl.misc. He is patient and kind, never chiding nor arrogant. He has been doing this job for many years.

• Most Deserving Open Source Charity: The Usenix Association. They don't take sides. They promote technology and open standards while remaining vendor neutral. They promote all aspects of advanced technology, but are especially supportive of open source solutions. No organization has done more to legitimize us over the last twenty-five years.

• Best Open Source Advocate: Larry Wall. He doesn't rant against anyone, tries to help everyone, and gives his code away for use by anyone, even Microsoft users. He doesn't restrict his good works to things that only benefit his friends. He doesn't preach, but lives by example.

• Best Unix Desktop Eyecandy: The newest version of the randomizing X screensaver. It's really great in a room full of people on acid.

• Best Unix Desktop Earcandy: The following entry in one's .Xdefaults file:

  *visualBell: on

• Best Desktop Theme: ShinyMetal

• Best Open Source-Related Book: In order of highest to lowest, all worthy of the award:
  • Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C by Lincoln Stein and Doug MacEachern.
  • Damian Conway's Object-Oriented Perl.
  • Elements of Programming With Perl by Andrew L. Johnson.

• Best Perl Module: Damian Conway's Class::Multimethods module for traditional OO in Perl.

• Best Apache Module: mod_perl; how can there be any question?

• Best Open Source Text Editor: The vim editor (vi improved), complete with its gvim graphical incarnation and its perl and python plug-ins.

• Best Deserving of a $2,000 Award:
  1. The late, great Rich Stevens's children's college fund
  2. Larry Wall's children's college fund
  3. Dennis Ritchie's retirement fund.
  (Perhaps those count as charities :-)

• Best Designed Interface in a Graphical Application:
  1. The eesh shell for controlling Enlightenment.
  2. The ddd debugger
  3. MacOS X's environment.

• Best Designed Interface in a Non-Graphical Application:
  1. The {Free,Open}BSD ports collection: being able to just cd and type make and have everything happen is the best thing that ever happened to third-parts apps.
  2. The make menuconfig directive for building Linux kernels.
  3. The v4.0 trn newsreader, with scoring and plug-ins.

• Best Dressed: Larry Wall, whether he's wearing Hawaiian shirts, tie-dies, or best of all, his outlandish, pastel-coloured tuxedos.

• Favorite Slashdot Comment Poster:
  1. Guy Harris
  2. Tom Christiansen
  3. Enoch Root
  4. Jay Maynard

• Favorite Slashdot Author: David Brin wins this one hands down.

• Best Slashdot Story of 1999: Eric Raymond's story about viruses on Microsoft vs Unix.

• Big Dumb Patent Bully: Amazon, followed by Unisys.

• Big Dumb Domain Bully: NSI, followed by Etoys.

• Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism: Slashdot.

Here are some links for more information on the book:

Andrew's home page for the book at Manning Publications

a review by Billy Baron of Delphi Consultants at javamug.org

an online Perl programming course using Elements as its textbook

Disclaimer: I am from Winnipeg, and know the author.

Hackish OO features are a strange brickbat to throw at Perl, because Perl5's OO-features were strongly influenced by Python's

When it came time for the object design, he rejected much of the C++ model. That's probably just as well, since C++ has so many oddities not found in any other language with object support. Python's model seemed sufficiently clean and appealing that, as with so many other tools and languages where Larry "cherry-picked" the coolest property from eclectic sources, he took most of the object stuff from Python.

For example, the object's self reference (the "this" pointer) coming in as the initial argument in a method call rather than as a formally defined variable comes right from Python.

Of course, we weren't really content to stop there. One difference from Python is that the class itself can serve as something of a meta-object. This has some rather nifty ramifications to this. If you're filling out a check-list of features, you'll find that Perl OO programming supports classes and objects, single and multiple inheritance, instance methods and class methods, access to overridden methods (a virtual SUPER class), constructors and destructors, operator overloading, proxy methods via autoloading, delegation, a rooted hierarchy for all objects (class UNIVERSAL), and two different levels of garbage collection.

Before you diss it too much, you should know what Perl OO is actually about. If you're looking for more information or examples on Perl OO, here are some suggestions:

• The perltootc manpage, for managing class (and sometimes instance data) in Perl.
• The perltoot manpage, a tutorial for OO in Perl
• The perlobj manpage, a rather dry but essential page.
• The overload manpage, to see how operator overloading works with Perl objects.

• The Perl Cookbook (yes, my name is on the cover) has a chapter on objects. You can download the source through the Examples link there (either normal gzip or else Wintel zip format).
• A new book (that yes, I tech-edited, but no, which I don't get royalties on) is coming out by Damian Conway, called simply enough Object Oriented Perl. Damian is our Melville. :-) We've accepted three of this prolific fellow's papers in the refereed track at the next Perl Conference. One of them is even a technical paper that's written completely in a certain kind of poetry.

I don't mean to pretend that Perl's OO doesn't have its host of issues. The biggest one is that unless you're careful in your design, one class needs to get unnaturally chummy with its parent class to avoid accidentally overriding or interfering with not just functional members (methods) but also data members (attributes).

But as Larry has said: `Concentrate on Perl's strengths, not its weaknesses.'