Re: Re: The Black Art of Perl Programming?

As I said: there's about 5 to 8 books out there. How old is Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C? Please! Yes, there's a ton of good Perl books, but you will not find most of them at the big mega chains (ie, Borders, Books-a-million, Barnes & Noble). What you will find is the Camel, the Llama, the Rat, maybe the Panther, and a few others like Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics. But my point is that you will not find a selection that even approaches the Java selection. And quite frankly, I just find the Java titles a lot more appealing than titles like "Perl for Website Management" (which I'm sure is a great book, by the way) or "Perl for System Administration" (again, how long has this book been out?).

Just try to imagine yourself as a non-programmer or even a novice walking into one of these stores. Which language do you think you will be drawn to?

Comment on Re: Re: The Black Art of Perl Programming?

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Re: Re: Re: The Black Art of Perl Programming? by barbie (Deacon) on Nov 19, 2002 at 11:56 UTC
I think you're looking it partly from the wrong angle. Some of the Perl books were published 2 or 3 years ago, but those that haven't been updated for the most part don't need it. I have C books that are around 20 years old and are still current for learning the language. Just because a book is old doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile. However, I do agree that Java (and VB) take up far too much space on the shelves. I also agree that the use of CGI in the book title has started to be seen as a bad thing. Too many CGI application written in Perl have had bad press simply because of bad experiences from several years ago. Perl has been getting a facelift in recent times and some of the really good books (such as Perl & XML, Perl for Bioinformatics and even Perl for System Administration) will hopefully make people more aware that there is more to Perl than CGI. But how do we change this? One way is to write lots of reviews for the Perl books you have and add them to various sites to give them a bit more notoriety. Also if you are asking for a particular book and $bookstore doesn't have it in stock, ask them to do a look up to see how much it is and when it would be available. Some stores record look ups to see what people are requesting. If a book is getting more requests, but it's always out of stock, very quickly you are likely to find in back on the shelves. At the end of the day, it's all about promotion. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Barbie Birmingham Perl Mongers Web Site: http://birmingham.pm.org/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~	[reply]
Re: The Black Art of Perl Programming? by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Nov 19, 2002 at 13:06 UTC
Perl for System Administration is out for just over 2 years. So what? Nothing relevant to the book has changed since. Sure, 5.8 came out, but so what? The new things in 5.8 are mostly related to Unicode, threading and internals stuff. Hardly relevant for the sysadmin. Neither has Unix changed much in the last 2 years, we didn't just abandon processes or `/etc`. Sure, the quality of the book isn't very high (just like many other O'Reilly books), but I don't expect a second edition suddenly would. Books like "The Art of Computer Programming" and "Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment" were written before most (all?) Perl books. And they are more useful for a programmer (even a Perl programmer) than all "Perl" books combined. The quality of good books doesn't decay over time. Abigail	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Re: The Black Art of Perl Programming? by janjan (Beadle) on Nov 18, 2002 at 21:17 UTC
Just try to imagine yourself as a non-programmer or even a novice walking into one of these stores. Which language do you think you will be drawn to? Perl, clearly. If there aren't that many books out on the shelves, obviously it must be fairly easy to learn!	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: The Black Art of Perl Programming? by metadatum (Scribe) on Nov 18, 2002 at 20:58 UTC
There are 24 listings on http://perl.oreilly.com that don't contain CGI in the title....	[reply]