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Title: Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software (O'Reilly Nutshell) by Shawn P. Wallace, Richard Koman ISBN: 1565924789 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: February, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4
Rating: 2
Summary: Not an "O Really!" reaction by O'Reilly
Comment: I have no other option but accepting most of the negative reviews submitted to this book ( Graphics Programming with Perl and GNU software ). The book is definitely one of the horrible books that O'reilly was ever unfortunate enough to publish. I believe a similar title by "Manning" publication does a better job than this one. If you need the facts, read on.
If you want to purchase this book to learn how to program web graphics with Perl, stop right here and go to CPAN.org. Search for GD, GD::Graph and ImageMagick and read their manuals. That's all this book does any ways.
The only chapter I enjoyed was chapter one, "Image File Formats", which at least taught me something I hadn't known before.
Outlines of the chapters follow.
Chapter one - "Image File Formats" covers most of the basics you need to know to understand the anatomy of graphics, their compression algorithms and different formats available for the web, as well as their pros and cons. This is the chapter I enjoyed most. The chapter lasts over 30 pages.
Chapter two - "Serving graphics on the Web" talks a bit about serving images from within Perl. Talks how the browser loads the images, image load time and image caching. Shows the tag, and its attributes. Lasts another 30 pages.
Chapter 3 - "A Litany of Libraries" lists references to some of the graphics libraries available on the web. I would expect to see this chapter as an appendix.
Starting chapter 4 - "On-the-Fly graphics with GD" is the start of all the disappointment, and to some extent, annoyance. After a clumsy introduction to GD and some of its classes and methods, starts coding a chess board. The application itself is not so useful, but the code is worth consideration. The chapter also lists all the methods available through GD classes with some description of each.
Chapter 5, 6 and 7 are written in the same style as the above sibling. They concentrate on Image::Magic (also known as PerlMagick), GD::Graph (previously known as GIFgraph ) and Gimp respectively. Chapter 7 teaches how to write Gimp Plug-ins. You might consider this chapter if you're a Gimp user/fan.
Rating: 4
Summary: A great introduction - readable and not overwhelming
Comment: Freeware graphics tools for web development are abundant, if you know where to look. This book provides detailed examples of thier use with perl - and excellent text parsing language and defacto standard for cgi programming. With the proper extensions (all available free via GNU Software download) perl can provide "on the fly" rendering of web graphics.
Beginning with a proper understanding of graphics formats (gif, png, jpeg) commonly used on the web and detailing the differences between them, the reader quickly becomes an expert in thier differences and the advantages of each.
The meat of this book includes chapters on popular extensions to perl for graphics, GD, PerlMagick, GIFgraph, and the GIMP. I have always been amazed at the features in GIMP, but until this book did not realize that such features could be scripted in perl. The book list all the methods available through GD with a discussion of each.
Although the included web graphics cookbook is a bit short on recipes, the section on postscript makes up for the loss. If you have ever wanted to generate publisher quality postscript files from your web data the "Everything I Needed to Know About PostScript I learned Here" section is for you.
O'Reilly has a knack for generating 'must have' perl books that stand the test of time. This one is a must for the bookshelf of anyone who parses text with perl. Although a full treatise on this subject would encompasse thousands of pages, this book provides the essentials in an easy to use format. It should be considered an introductory text that will serve as an excellent starting point for the advanced web graphics user.
Rating: 5
Summary: Definitive coverage of freeware programmable graphics tools
Comment: This is not an art book. There are not even any color illustrations. Rather, there is uniquely definitive and comprehensive coverage of the most important freeware graphics tools useful for web development. There is a strong bias toward programmatic tools, those which can be controlled from server-parsed HTML or CGI using Perl, which allow drawing graphics interactively with the user on the fly. One example with source code is a Perl "biorhythm" calculator, where the user enters a birthdate and the web page draws a customized GIF bar chart with a sinusoidal envelope, emulating the coin-operated "biorhythm" machine at the Vince Lombardi Rest Area on I-95 in New Jersey. This basic technique can be used for charts of stock performance, server activity, and any other on-demand drawing. The ImageMagick tool, which can be run from a command line to do batch processing (such as thumbnailing) or through a Perl API, is also well covered, showing how to draw text labels onto images and do other tasks essential to good web practice. The GIMP, a web-friendly freeware clone of Adobe Photoshop, is covered primarily from the point of view of its relatively unknown Perl API, but this is not a book about the GIMP and there are better choices of books (especially those with color) if interactive use of the GIMP is your main concern. However, use of the GIMP to create basic web elements such as flaming marbles or imploding cats is covered. This book stands in a class by itself on its subject matter, and is destined to become one of the classic O'Reilly references. While it does have copious pointers to web information via URLs, the book's most serious deficiency is certainly that it is heavily tied to the current snapshot of available tools, and the freeware tool development pace will doubtlessly necessitate frequent revisions of this book, possibly as often as annually. The author is also to be commended for not flinching from discussions of technical issues where appropriate, such as image compression, interlacing, and the internals of GIF, JPEG, and PNG file formats, but these discussions are not essential to the book if the reader has little interest in technical issues and wants to get right to the cookbook graphics recipes.
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Title: Graphics Programming with Perl by Martien Verbruggen ISBN: 1930110022 Publisher: Manning Publications Company Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: CGI Programming with Perl by Gunther Birznieks, Scott Guelich, Shishir Gundavaram ISBN: 1565924193 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 15 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: Perl Cookbook by Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington ISBN: 1565922433 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: August, 1998 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Mastering Algorithms With Perl by John Macdonald, Jon Orwant, Jarkko Hietaniemi ISBN: 1565923987 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: August, 1999 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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