jmClifford has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi. The above mentioned book (with author Steven Holzner) was purchased by myself. Unfortunately the inside CD was broke on arrival. Can anyone point to possible web sites where I could find this data ?? This would save some typing.

Regards JC.....

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Re: Book; PERL 2nd Edition Black Book
by cavac (Prior) on Oct 09, 2024 at 11:35 UTC

    That book is from 2001, if my internet-foo isn't failing me. Aside from a bit of retro-computing, i wouldn't recommend it for learning Perl.

    Unfortunately, Steven passed away in 2013, so whatever website he had (if any) is probably long gone. The publisher (Coriolis group) also seems to have gone away. I peeked into some of the shadier corners of the net, and a few places have scans of the book but not a copy of the CD.

    Your best bet is to find another owner of the book as ask them if they's be willing to send you an electronic copy of the CD (which may or may not be legal). Aside from posting here and in other Perl forums, you could look at Ebay and similar platforms and try to contact all of the sellers of that book.

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      I was told once in a book shop that it's legal to copy a whole book if it's out of print. In this case even if only the German translation wasn't available anymore.

      Seems to be also covered by US law

      Q. Can I make a copy of a book that is out of print and unavailable?

      While the book is still sold by resellers, I'm pretty sure that copying the CD in this case is still legal.

      Anyway, those CDs mostly just covered the code printed in the book, to avoid typing.

      Your "shadier places of the Internet" will most likely offer ebook version, and the code can be copy/pasted directly.

      Cheers Rolf
      (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
      see Wikisyntax for the Monastery

        > Anyway, those CDs mostly just covered the code printed in the book, to avoid typing.

        Yep, from my legally acquired PDF version of the book:

          What’s on the CD-ROM

          The Perl Black Book, 2nd Edition companion CD-ROM contains elements specifi- cally selected to enhance the usefulness of this book. You’ll find the code from the book arranged in directories, organized by chapter.

          There are two versions of all source code—one in the DOS subdirectory and one in the Unix subdirectory for each chapter. The only difference between these versions is how the text is formatted.

          The DOS version of each source file uses a carriage return/line feed at the end of each line, as is standard in DOS, and the Unix version uses a newline character (only) at the end of each line, as is standard in Unix. I’ve provided both versions to let you choose the version best suited to your editing program. Besides this differ- ence, the two versions of the source code files are the same.

          The file code XX, where XX is a chapter number, contains the code from Chapter XX. To run a specific example from Chapter XX, copy and paste the appropriate code from code XX to a new file and run that new file using Perl. Note that in some cases you should update file paths or URLs in the code before execution—see the book for the details.

          There is no special preparation needed for installation, just copy the files you want to use to your hard disk.

        Cheers Rolf
        (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
        see Wikisyntax for the Monastery

Re: Book; PERL 2nd Edition Black Book
by ysth (Canon) on Oct 09, 2024 at 17:02 UTC

    That old a book is going to miss many changes to Perl. I'd recommend one of the less than ten years old books on https://learn.perl.org/books/, either Learning Perl 7th edition (covers Perl 5.24), or Modern Perl, Forth Edition (covers Perl 5.22). The latter is available for free online (including pdf and epub) as well as print copies.

    Or, a little more pricey, Learning Perl 8th edition (covers Perl 5.34).

    --
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