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Review of "Data Munging With Perl" at DiverseBooks

pudge on 2002-05-30T07:10:45

Koschei writes "Dave Cross's book, Data Munging With Perl has been reviewed at DiverseBooks by Alex McLintock. Seems a favourable review, which is always good =)" ... assuming the book itself is worthy of it, yes. I've not read this book, so I have no opinion, but I have heard good things about it.

Great book

jabbo on 2002-05-30T15:25:58

The section on Parse::RecDescent and the various XML modules was instrumental in rolling out an application, under budget and on time, that has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue since then, at a labor cost of almost nil.

That's really quite impressive. The book is well worth the price, and a good starting point for more advanced forays into (or extension work on) the topics discussed.

Re:Great book

nicholas on 2002-05-30T16:31:26

Clearly this represents great perl advocacy material. Are there more details about this online, such as at O'Reilly's perl success stories page?

here's another review...

tbc on 2002-05-30T20:52:01

...by a Perl hacker at the Pikes Peak Perl Mongers site.

Poor Review

samtregar on 2002-05-31T00:12:59

The review is just plain poorly done. I was left with the impression that the writer didn't even finish the book - he displays about as much information on the last chapters as could be gleaned from the table of contents. Worse, I have no idea what the writer thought of the book. I can tell he didn't like some of the material, but I don't know if that means he thinks it isn't worth reading. At one point he states "I think this sort of book will sink or swim based on how good their regex sections are - and how accessible they are to beginner users." But then he never gets around to revealing if he thinks the book achieves this goal!

Argh!

-sam

Re:Poor Review

koschei on 2002-05-31T02:00:57

He tried =) The problem with such sites can be the varying review quality. There's apparently a review of "Perl Graphics Programming" up there now (I can't seem to connect to it, or salon).

Re:Poor Review

koschei on 2002-05-31T02:34:32

Ah no - can access it now. Just an announcement that Manning's "Graphic Programming with Perl" has arrived for review.

Re:Poor Review

alexmc on 2002-06-14T11:04:05

Actually we haven't even got a copy yet. The article was merely saying that it was published... I think we were offered a review copy but I don't want to ask for too many books unless I know we have reliable reviewers in London to do the review.

As you may have guessed from my review of the Dave Cross book my enthusiasm for the review petered out and I didn't construct as full a review as I might have done. Many reviewers don't even get that far. It is a problem with amateur reviewers.

If anyone wants to review perl books for my site then please get in touch.

Re:Poor Review

alexmc on 2002-06-14T11:00:18

I wrote that review and can't really argue with your criticism of it. I was not happy with the review as a whole and that was partly because of the bitty-ness of the book. It had lots of useful pieces in it, but it didn't seem to be a useful reference, and wasn't an interesting cover-to-cover read. I do know people who have gotten useful stuff out of it - but it is difficult to identify who those people are and point this book at them, and them only.