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Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0
Craig Maloney contributed this review of the Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0, which he calls "the most portable way to get five Perl books from here to there." Like others in the same series, this package from O'Reilly assembles several related titles onto a single, searchable disk to save endless page-thumbing, but not without a few glitches.
Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0
author
(Various)
pages
N/A
publisher
O'Reilly and Associates, Inc.
rating
8
reviewer
Craig Maloney
ISBN
0-596-00164-9
summary
The update to the previous Perl CD Bookshelf with a new edition, two deletions, and a new title.
Books, but not a book
O'Reilly's Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0 includes the following books, which have all been reviewed earlier on Slashdot before:
- Perl in a Nutshell , by Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour & Nathan Patwardhan
- Programming Perl, 3rd Edition , by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen & Jon Orwant
- Advanced Perl Programming , by Sriram Srinivasan
- Perl Cookbook , by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington
- Perl for System Administration , by David N. Blank-Edelman
The inclusion of Perl in a Nutshell is also a nice touch, since Perl in a Nutshell can answer the mundane problems, while the CD can be used for the tougher ones.
What's bad? The Java search engine may be the only way to make The Perl Bookshelf cross platform, but it is very weak. Worse, if you are running Linux, the search engine won't work at all. You'll need to visit O'Reilly and download a patch, copy the CD to your hard disc, and apply the patch using a 'fixed' shell script. Windows users fortunately will not have to go through such hoops to get the search running properly. The searches themselves leave something to be desired as well, namely the lack of a highlighting of the search term or even the ability to move to the term being searched. For instance, searching on 'chomp' will bring up the Perl function page as one of it's choices. However, it brings it up without positioning the page to the function itself, so the user has to scroll through the list of functions to get to the one she wants. Thankfully, the master index is very complete, so you may not even have to bother with the search engine at all. It's a shame that something which could have been so powerful is so crippled.Conclusion This is the most portable way to get five Perl books from here to there. While there are problems with the keyword search, the master index should be good enough to get you the information you need. If you've been considering getting these books this is the most cost effective way to bring them into your library."
You can purchase this CD at FatBrain.
Instead of AddAll, I prefer to use BestBookBuys. Both AddAll and BestBookBuys appear to have similar functionality (for instance, they both identified BookPool as having the lowest price), but I personally prefer the interface on BestBookBuys.
But, I do share your sentiment about Fatbrain. Sure, it used to be independent and cool, but now they're just yet-another subsidiary of Barnes & Noble (bleh!). Besides, Fatbrain also costs $18 more than the lowest AddAll/BestBookBuys price.
Alex Bischoff
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Agreed, but there isn't much to be said that hadn't been said in the previous review. That's why I left it as a link to the previous review. I agree it's a very good book, but what more can be said than that? :)
Learning Perl is not in the Perl CD Bookshelf Version 2.0, so there was nothing to wait for.
Nope. It's still broken. :) (I just tried it, and got nothing back)
Actually, the legalese says you can't copy it to a server for public use. I know, I forgot that my copies weren't unavailable from my public side, and got a letter from the O'Reilly legal department when the UNIX and Perl Bookshelves started showing up on spider searches of my site.
It does indicate that copying it for your own personal use is OK/
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This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Ok - I don't see anyone asking this -
I have the first edition, with the six books.
Is it worth it to buy the new edition?
Other than the mentioned 'drop two books, add one', are the rest unchanged from the last set?
As for that annoying Java thing, I stopped using that after about 5 minutes.
Why didn't they just write a simple search in say, um... PERL? (I would guess most users have it on their systems...)
If I really can't find what I need using the hypertext table of contents, I'll usually use grep...
Cheers,
Jim
MMDC Mobile Media
-- My Weblog.
What does XML have to do with a search engine? Are you planning just to grep through a huge XML document? Because you could do the same thing with HTML just as easily...
This is a grievous error! Advanced Perl Programming delves into the workings of Perl itself and is a must read for true users of Perl.
I second this. Advanced Perl Programming is fantastic, and definitely necessary to learning how Perl's guts work, which lets you do some really neat things. It also helps you optimize code, since not only does it tell you stuff like why 'my' is faster than 'local', but it explains why. It also gets down and dirty with how things are implemented at the C level, the structure of the generated bytecode, and lots of other things. Definitely a must-have for hardcore Perl users.
I'm not sure it's such a great loss that it's not on the CD though; it's the type of book where you'd want a paper copy to read, rather than to use as a reference.
--
If you don't want to carry a CD-ROM around with you back and forth to work, all of these books (except for Programming Perl?! What's the deal with that?) are also available at O'Reilly's Safari service. That way you can try these books out for a month (or as long as you want) and get as much out of them as you can/want.
I would highly recommend the "Perl Cookbook", as it gives very good examples on most things that you want to do with Perl. I find the camel books sort of annoying and not very useful, so I tend to stay away from them, but to each his own. I have heard that there are some problems with a few of the HTTP related examples, but I've never run into any...
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
http://examples.oreilly.com/perlcdbs2/
Yes, there are six books in the Perl CD v1.0. Speaking of which, when are the pirated versions of v2.0 going to show up on the web?
--
Its called a 'bookmark' and some programs actually have fairly effective ones.
The MRU list in Windows ("Documents") is equally helpful for resuming where you left off with something. Its not that hard for a computer to track where you went -- its just hard for us to come up with nice UIs that allow you to get back there easily.
For example: I'd love it if search engines remembered which results I'd used the previous time I searched for the same terms and seperated them for me so if I didn't find what I was looking for before, I could ignore them, and if I did, I'd have a smaller list to go through.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I will probably buy this set now that they have removed the Win32 book. I don't recall how much the first edition was, but I remember that having 20% of the cost go to a book I was never going to use seemed ridiculous.
And Kudos to O'Reilly for doing e-books. ALL of their books should be available this way. It is best to learn things in front of the computer, but switching between keyboard and mouse is enough of a hassle, adding a book (and having to hold down pages with one hand) is a major pain in the ass when you are trying to learn something new. It's much easier to just tab between the book window and your editor.
Obviously you should use Perl and search via keyword, subject, or regex. That way you can even learn about regexes by using them. If you want to search on another computer, you can figure a way to do that with Perl.
You are going to have a Perl interpreter on your machine if you are using the CD. They could bundle a Perl distribution probably too. And obviously it is a pretty good bet that the purchaser also will have a Perl CGI capable web server running on his or her machine, one of the gazillions that run Perl. So you know, you could use CGI to search on your own computer. Not so tough to find such a server on the net even if someone installs it, they'd probably sell more to companies that want to set up such a CGI server in-house too.
And you can probably make a crossplatform binary with perlcc. Better yet, just include a perl DBM or flat file with all this index and a specification for it, then make building specific plugins to the search engine "extra-credit" problems!
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
The fundamental problem with books on CD is that I can find information faster in a well-thumbed, well-used printed book than you can with your shiny new CD and search engine. What needs to be done in the world of virtual publishing is some way to provide a "thumbing" function that allows you to thumb through a virtual book as if it was the real thing, without having to wait for screen updates on every page, etc. Hmm...maybe there's a patent in here somewhere...
Quick answer: nothing, obviously.
See my other post. In case you missed it, O'Reilly already has a service like this: Safari
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Agreed. Mason is an excellent way to make embedded perl a little easier to code. Not to mention the $session->{} hash that you can pass seemlessly between pages. I use it for the site in my .sig.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Yes I have and love my Safari account. I just wish I could swap more often. Other than that it rocks. And at 10 bucks a month for 5 books it is well worth it.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
The article goes on to mention that the Java search engine is proprietary and has cross-platform compatibility problems.
Oh, if only there were some sort of cross-platform language available, perhaps even one especially well suited to text processing and regular expression searching!
--
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
My question: why doesn't ThinkGeek carry this in its Books department? It's lighter weight than a case of Whoop Ass...
sulli
RTFJ.
Back when I started on at the current job, I had the company buy a copy of the UNIX CD Bookshelf... not because I needed it, but hey, they were willing, and I get a free book.
Overall, I find the HTML format to be wonderfully indexed and cross-referenced, and, as mentioned, the search engine is a flaming pile of crap. It's accurate, but obscures the sought-after data by not jumping directly to the location in a page. The O'Reilly Bookshelves are useful -- a bunch of good books for about $70, on CD, cross-platform... but there are limitations. I'd honestly rather have the books...
MCH/VO S* W- N+++++ PEC+++ D(s++/r) A a+>+++ C* G++(++++) Q+ 666 Y
Could someone please post a link to that patch? I haven't been able to find it anywhere on O'Reilly's site, so I am stuck without the Java search thingy.
At home, I like to curl up with a paper back book, like the Camel book.
If you still have a copy of Altavista Discovery around anywhere, install that and copy the books to HD, and let Discovery index it.
:)
Thats a hell of a search engine for the books
Alan
--
Tequila - drink of the gods.
Tequila - drink of the gods.
The timing of Learning Perl 3rd Ed was unfortunate, and precluded it from being included in Perl CD 2nd Ed. From what I was told, this was the only factor in its non-inclusion.
I do own this set and I must say, it's nice to have but the best part was that it came with Perl In A Nutshell in paper format. I have just about worn out that book. As nice as it is having the text in a searchable format, it's refreshing to pick up a big book and thumb through the pages.
BTW: Has anyone checkout out Safari? It's an O'Reilly website that allows you to "subscribe" to a set of books each month and search them online. Now if I could only get my company to buy into this...
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Does Fatbrain pay someone to link to their site for every book review? They are not even close to the cheapest site on the net. If you want a good price comparison, go to AddAll. Just type in the title, and it will search about 30 online book retailers for the lowest price, including coupons and shipping/handling.
Besides, does anyone else besides me think "Fatbrain" is a stupid name?