I stumbled on this website while searching for a code snippet and I think it could prove to be a valuable resource, especially to beginning to intermediate perl coders like myself. This site aims to aggregate code samples posted to the web from published books on programming.

The site's "About" page states: "Codefetch's mission is to connect programmers and authors so that programmers get the information they need, and the work of authors is supported and encouraged.....Codefetch uses and supports open source software, and is an affiliate of the Open Technology Business Center. Codefetch's code excerpts connect users of open source software with great books about those software products-- spurring the continuing development of top-quality documentation for open source software." Sounds good to me...

So how do you use the site? According to the help page Codefetch lets you combine three types of searches:

Google-style: Enter words separated by spaces and they'll be found wherever they all appear on a page.
Full-text: Like a text editor, Codefetch can find $, {, % or any other ASCII symbol.
Regular Expression: You can even use a few regular expression constructs.

I decided to test the site by comparing a Super Search on Perlmonks to a Google-style search at Codefetch for the term "LWP::Simple". The results for Super Search can be seen here, and the results of the Codefetch search can be seen here. I think that Codefetch's result compares favorably to Super Search in terms of giving you access to working code and pointers to further explanation. Obviously, if you don't have the book that Codefetch points to, you've got to make a trip to the library or the bookstore or to Amazon. But once you've got the text you are likely to have a carefully edited, tested explanation. With Super Search, of course, you might turn up a question that no one felt like answering:). In any case, this could be a useful spot to point SOPW's to when responding to their questions.

Codefetch also happens to support a large number of other languages in addition to Perl:
C:Cold Fusion:Ant:C#:Flash ActionScript:Apache Configuration
C++:HTML / CSS:AppleScript:Delphi:Pascal Javascript / Ajax SQL
Java:JSP / JSTL / JSF:Unix / Shell:Objective-C Cocoa:Perl
XML-Schema:Python:PHP:XSLT / XPATH:Ruby / Rails

To sum up, Codefetch.com seems to me to be a worthwhile addition to one's bookmark list of programming sites.

Scott
-The quality of an answer depends as much upon the quality of the question as the knowledge and skill of the teacher.

In reply to Codefetch.com: Sample code from published programming books by Scott7477

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