in reply to What's missing in Perl books?

CPAN Pearls

CPAN has become a mess, so many modules, many of them crappy, unmaintained, but still there are hidden pearls, small modules that should be in everybody toolkit but that remain mostly undiscovered.

And I am not talking about the big frameworks (POE, Catalyst, DBI, etc.) or about modules everybody already knows (Text::CSV, Net::FTP, etc.).

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Re^2: What's missing in Perl books?
by merlyn (Sage) on Nov 16, 2005 at 09:17 UTC
    but still there are hidden pearls, small modules that should be in everybody toolkit but that remain mostly undiscovered.
    Although perhaps not as organized as you might want, this is mostly the goal of my magazine articles. Besides the specific example (and some general handwaving), what else do you want to know about each CPAN module?

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
    Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

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      Well, your articles are more as stories: you find some problem and then you tell how to solve it. It's great for mag columns but not for books.

      What I would like to see is some kind of reference that goes through the best (hidden) CPAN modules and tells me the pros and contras of every one and why I should use one or another.

      The focus of the book should be just to let the reader know about these pearls and to easily find the best module for his task at hand. Showing how to use the modules should not be required per se, but only to demonstrate the discussion.

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Re^2: What's missing in Perl books?
by samtregar (Abbot) on Nov 16, 2005 at 18:43 UTC
    I think that would be a really hard book to write. Chapter 7 of Writing Perl Modules for CPAN (free download here) took a mini-stab at it and it was the hardest chapter to complete. It's very difficult to write an even-handed treatment of someone else's work. It's equally hard to make decisions about which modules to include and how much space to give each one.

    This may be better done as a series of articles, perhaps modeled after the awesome Perl Advent.

    -sam

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Re^2: What's missing in Perl books?
by john_oshea (Priest) on Nov 16, 2005 at 22:30 UTC

    Not a book, and only once a year, but www.perladvent.org has had the odd cracker (groan) in it.

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Re^2: What's missing in Perl books?
by itub (Priest) on Nov 16, 2005 at 18:24 UTC
    The second edition of Advanced Perl Programming is mostly a "CPAN Review" of sorts (but it's mainly about what you would call the "commonly known" modules). The problem with a book about CPAN is that it's always changing. The topic would be more suited to a periodical publication or website.
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