Re: Technical books

["Steven J. Owens" <puff -at- NETCOM -dot- COM>]

Linda Sherman writes:
> David Dvorkin wrote:
> > Janet Valade wrote:
> > > I see that the San Diego Technical Book store is having a 20%
> > > off sale on O'Reilly books. Does anyone have a recommendation for
> > > must-have O'Reilly books?
> >
> > All of 'em!  Whatever subject I want a book on, I first check for an
> > O'Reilly book on the topic.
>
> I second that for everything except their programming language books,
> which I've found consistently inferior across the board.

     I'll second that in general; O'Reilly is where I always *start*
my search for a good computer book, but not always where I end it.
Being an O'Reilly book isn't a guarantee that it'll be good, but the
odds are surely a lot better than most of the rest of the bookshelf.

> Also, their book on CURSES is completely lame. It only covers the
> original CURSES and not the later implementations, and some of the
> samples don't work right in some fairly common UNIX implementations
> (like SCO's). I can't imagine that too many TWs would care to know a
> thing about CURSES, but if in some moment of temporary insanity the mood
> should strike, avoid this book.

     Amusingly enough, the first book I bought as an employed
technical writer (on the company credit card, too) *should* have been
the CURSES book but instead it was, hm, argh, I can't remember the
name of the library that CURSES uses.  I read through about 200 pages
and got to Appendix B which started with "Of course, nobody in their
right mind actually *uses* this library directly, everybody uses
CURSES, and there's a fine O'Reilly book on it...".  AARRRRRRGH!

     I never did go back and buy the CURSES book, I just used a lame
hack that I was later informed was the "standard way to do that" at
that company anyway.  Glad I missed out on another frustrating
experience.

> Other than that, I've never had an O'Reilly book that didn't have that
> oft-thumbed look after a month or two.

     Yup.  Of course, specific recommendations depend on what you
working on or need to learn more about.  By the way, I'd check around
on Amazon, Barnesandnoble.com and the O'Reilly web site (ora.com)
before going on a spending spree; you might find better discounts on
the web.  O'Reilly at one time was offering resellers' licenses (I was
very seriously considering getting one); for $500 for 1 year you got
one of every software package they publish and you could buy any of
their books, as many as you like, for 50% off, and do whatever you
wanted with them (sell, keep, burn, eat, etc).  I almost got a
license, but I'm not in the bookselling business.

     (If they're still offering them, maybe techwrl could club together
and get one and order a slew of books :-).

     Here's my standard recommended books file for folks learning
Perl/CGI, most of them O'Reilly.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Suggested Reading

... oh, and some suggested reading material, all from O'Reilly:

     CGI Programming on the World Wide Web
     Learning Perl ("the LLama Book")
     Programming Perl ("the Camel Book")
     Advanced Perl Programming ("the Panther Book")
     Perl Cookbook ("the Ram book" - actually a Bighorn sheep)
     Mastering Regular Expressions ("the Owl book")
     Web Client Programming In Perl

I have listed them roughly in my suggested reading order, although
there are a lot of caveats.

CGI Programming is done in Perl and makes some allowances that you
might not know Perl, but I highly recommend that you get either
Learning Perl or Programming Perl at the same time.  Or both.

Learning Perl takes a more lesson-by-lesson approach to the topic, but
is *not* geared towards learning Perl for CGI stuff. (Note:  It's also
been reported to have a lot of errors;  check the O'Reilly site for
errata and see if there's a more recent printing).

Programming Perl is more reference-oriented and generally strongly
suggested by anybody with a lot of programming experience.  It's the
"bible" of the Perl language.  Co-authored by the creator of Perl
himself!

Advanced Perl Programming is pretty good (I'm up to chapter 11 so
far).  Don't let the title prevent you from cracking it open before
you finish Programming Perl, however.  The first five chapters explain
a lot of things about data structures, references, subroutines,
closures, and using eval that Programming Perl seems to take for
granted.  I think I'd have had a lot easier of a time with Perl if I'd
had those five chapters around when I started really doing interesting
stuff with data.

The Perl Cookbook is one of the most recent additions to O'Reilly's
Perl books.  It's just what the title says; a THICK (about 750 pages)
volume of problem/solution examples, along with sample code and
discussions of the issues involved.  Look for me on page XXXII, near
the bottom :-).

Mastering Regular Expressions is highly recommended by just about
everybody involved with the other Perl books on this list.  I haven't
read it myself, but then again I've been using regular expressions in
Emacs since forever, so I'm less intimidated by them. I *still* plan
to get a copy of this book someday soon, so I can really understand
and use regular expressions.  One of my friends, also one of the guys
who helped me over some rough spots early in my Perl adventure, told
me "In Perl, If you can do it with a regular expression, that's
probably the right way."

I skimmed through Web Client Programming in Perl and I was fairly
impressed; it's a slim book but looks well worth having.  This is for
doing things where you want to make automated programs that interact
with web servers.  Perl has some powerful libraries for making doing
things over the net as easy and flexible as doing things with local
files.  For some complex tasks, this could be *really* handy to have
around.

I haven't looked at, nor have I heard opinions from anyone, the Perl
Resource Kit, the Perl reference, Perl in a Nutshell.  I'd like to
hear from anybody who has things to say about them.

Also been recommended to read (but haven't yet):
     Effective Perl Programming (Addison-Wesley)
     Perl:  The Programmer's Companion (John Wiley & Sons)

In the preface to Perl Cookbook, the authors suggest Perl: The
Programmer's Companion is good for experienced programmers who're
getting into Perl, while Effective Perl Programming is about the
object module, developing modules, debugging, and CPAN.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Steven J. Owens
puff -at- netcom -dot- com


 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=