<tangent>
I don't think anyone would argue that the first edition of the mouse book (CGI Programming on the WWW) was far inferior to the second edition of the mouse book (CGI Programming with Perl).

Actually, if, as I suspect, you mean argue with the claim that rather than "argue that", then I would.

A lot happened between 1996 and 2000. In 1996, the Mouse was the best book in its class. I'm not so confident that was true in 2000, by which time the competition had grown considerably.

The first edition's language-agnostic approach was not only appropriate for the time period (i.e. before Perl got the "duct tape of the internet" reputation) it provided a better overview of the real topic: CGI.

In contrast, the second edition took a kitchen-sink approach with whole chapters on subjects like email and data persistence. And then, when it came to discussing CGI itself, the second edition might as well have been renamed CGI.pm Programming with Perl as, after the first 25% of the book or so, just about every example was based on CGI.pm.

In short, the first edition was a good focused book about CGI and the second was YAPB (yes, that's "Yet Another Perl Book") with the wrong color cover.

In the interest of full disclosure...

I'm probably biased because I learned CGI from the first and nothing from the second. I purchased the second edition simply because I was struggling with a severe, debilitating addiction to purchasing O'Reilly books and it was that week's fix. Had I taken the time to carefully inspect the book while still standing safely in the aisles of Border's rather than just giving into my obsession with those shiny green, pink, and blue covers, I might have realized it contained almost nothing that wasn't better presented in the Camel, the Rhino, the Pelican or the first edition Mouse, all of which I already owned. But no. I bought it and dealt with my disappointment by telling myself that the extra inch on my second shelf of critter books was well worth it.

I'm much better now. I've been clean, sober, and O'Reilly free for almost 2 years. Ok... Ok... but I have been O'Reilly free. Well, mostly. I do still pull a few old favorites off the shelf now and again, though. :-)

</tangent> 
-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

In reply to Mouse vs. Mouse by sauoq
in thread Book Reviews getting unmanageable by PhilHibbs

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