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Title: Perl & LWP by Sean M. Burke ISBN: 0596001789 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 26 June, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43
Rating: 5
Summary: Great book!
Comment: If you are unfamiliar with LWP and web scraping, or HTML parsing using tokens and trees, I strongly recommend this book. It's the best *introduction* to these topics I've been able to find. Sean's style is clear and concise-just what I expect from an O'Reilly book.
To get the most out of this book, you'll want to be familiar with Object Oriented programming in Perl, because (with the exception of LWP::Simple) all the modules discussed in this book use objects.
Also, don't expect the LWP sample code in the book to work correctly. Many of the sites that the scripts try to "scrape" have changed their layout since this book was published, braking the scripts. This isn't a problem though, because the samples Sean provides are very short and clear, so it's not necessary to run them in order to figure out how they work.
Rating: 1
Summary: Terrible, bug-infested book...
Comment: I really don't know how the previous 5 reviews gave this book 5 stars. I was really excited about this book when I first read the reviews, and now here I am only a few chapters in and already thinking about dumping it altogether. This book has so many flaws for its size, the biggest of which was the codes. I am no Perl expert, but could find my way around in a decent size program. However, no examples I have tried so far in the book actually worked, and some of these are just 10-20 lines long. I am completely new to LWP, I guess like anyone who would buy this book, so it's hard for me to see what the author is doing. The explanation of the code didn't help much either. As oppose to explaining the steps, he just said "the code below does this". And it's pretty obvious little or no editing has gone into this book. If you do buy this book, you'll probably want to make a trip to the Errata page at the Oreilly website. The amount of typos, printing errors, warnings and grammatical mistakes found by readers and editors listed on this page rivals the usuable content of the book itself. You know what, I have spent way too much on this book already.....
Rating: 5
Summary: Exploit the web with power and ease
Comment: Disclaimer: The author is an online-type-friend and I used to work with the author of the foreword. I even got my copy for free.
If the above hasn't totally disqualified me from commenting, I just wanted to note some things most reviewers have ignored.
The book is an excellent resource for two kinds of people.
Many people scan technical books looking for little scripts and thingies; a few lines changed and BOOM! They have the program they always wanted. Sean provides those in abundance.
It is also a good resource for a complete novice to learn about the hodgepodge of technologies we call the web - the ... wire protocol, markup languages, tree-based parsers, and encodings, to name just a few. The author is an expert in all of these, but has restrained himself to provide just enough information to get a programmer going. I was impressed time and again with how he manages to give the reader exactly enough knowledge to get their tasks done, with short but accurate explanations and pointers on where to learn more.
Best of all, this is a funny technical book. Usually if a technical book has pretensions to humor, it jabs you in the arm repeatedly with lots of groaner puns and dumb cartoons, in order to fill the space between bland code sections. But Sean has sprinkled the *code sections* with his dada sense of humor, which also highlights the difference between mere placeholder data and the concept being illustrated. And then the text gets right back to the point.
This is a slim work (242 pages, no thicker than my thumb) but packs a lot of value for your money. So buy it already.
My only criticism is that it is exclusively focused on consuming services on the web - like downloading TV listings and so on. But you can use everything Sean talks about to also *publish* information; for instance, making some nifty Perl-based thing to update your online journal from MS Word or something. Or to aggregate information that's out there, and feed it back onto the web. Nevertheless, if you've got half a brain it will be obvious how to do this stuff once you've absorbed everything you'll get from this book.
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Title: Perl & XML (O'Reilly Perl) by Erik T. Ray, Jason McIntosh ISBN: 059600205X Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: April, 2002 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition by Jeffrey, E. F. Friedl ISBN: 0596002890 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 15 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Programming Web Services with Perl by Randy J. Ray, Pavel Kulchenko ISBN: 0596002068 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Computer Science & Perl Programming: Best of TPJ by Jon Orwant ISBN: 0596003102 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 15 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Perl Graphics Programming by Shawn Wallace ISBN: 059600219X Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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