All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Apress Publishes 'Writing Perl Modules for CPAN'

pudge on 2002-08-13T13:50:55

samtregar writes "My new book, Writing Perl Modules for CPAN, is now available. If you ever wanted to learn to write modules and release them on CPAN, now is the time. For experienced module makers, the book offers advanced training in XS, Inline::C and CGI::Application. You can read the first chapter online for free. The book is shipping now from Amazon, BN and others."

images

gbarr on 2002-08-13T14:25:12

Sam must be cursing me. I change the look of search, just before his book is published :)

Re:images

samtregar on 2002-08-14T15:02:05

Yup! If it had happened just a couple weeks earlier I would have had time to reshoot it...

Actually, I'm overjoyed at how much better search.cpan.org has been working since the change. Excellent work!

-sam

cpanplus

2shortplanks on 2002-08-13T14:36:23

I see the first chapter shows how to install a CPAN module with CPAN.pm...though there's no mention of CPANPLUS. I was wondering why this is? Was CPANPLUS's development too late to be included, or was is left out for simplicity, or for some other reason?

Re:cpanplus

samtregar on 2002-08-14T14:43:52

You guessed it. I wrote chapter one almost exactly a year ago. I thought about going back and adding a sidebar or a footnote but in the end there just wasn't time.

-sam

packrats

jdavidb on 2002-08-13T15:11:37

I see the sample chapter mentions the perlpackrats mailing list was active from 1993 until 1996, more or less replaced by CPAN. Yesterday I thought I heard hfb mention the packrats list was still active as a group collecting items of historical note. Is this the same group, or two groups with a different name?

I've always had an acute interest in history. I'm the one who always wanted to know who discovered an algorithm or coded a program and why, even more than wanting to know how it works. :)

Re:packrats

samtregar on 2002-08-14T15:05:36

I believe hfb made an attempt to restart packrats some time back, but looking at the archives it didn't look like it succeeded. Certainly the mailing-list did end in 1996 although it may have risen from the grave more recently. I'll be happy to put in an errata about it if someone would be so kind as to point me to subscription instructions.

Thanks,
-sam

Re:packrats

wickline on 2002-08-14T17:26:02

here ya go :)

http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=packrats

-matt

Re:packrats

samtregar on 2002-08-14T17:40:37

Thanks. This will go in the errata as soon as I get a few more errors together.

Actually, I now realize that I've seen this page before. I looked in the archives to determine whether the list was live and decided that it wasn't. Looking again I'm forced to conclude the same, but perhaps pointing interested people to it will change that.

-sam

other chapters?

gav on 2002-08-14T00:02:10

Is there any chance that other chapters would be released? I'd like to see a more indepth topic.

How does CGI::Application fits in with the rest of the book? It seems a bit out of place.

Re:other chapters?

samtregar on 2002-08-14T14:51:19

I don't think there will be any more PDF releases, although it's possible I'll adapt a chapter as an article at some point.

However, I'll be happy to explain the CGI::Application tie-in. CGI::Application is a module that allows you to build CGI programs as Perl modules. Given this ability it is now possible to build reusable CGI programs and release them on CPAN for all to enjoy. See CGI::Application::MailPage for my proof-of-concept. It's not what I would call "core material" but it is an area where I think CPAN could grow in the future.

-sam

Just wondering...

hsmyers on 2002-08-14T02:09:28

I've got it on order, but I was wondering if there was any information about how to do more advanced things than a simple module. For instance one of mine builds three Berkeley DB's from CSV files and I had a hell of a time figuring out how to do that in a cross-platform way-- I'd like to seem more along these lines...

--hsm

Re:Just wondering...

samtregar on 2002-08-14T15:00:16

The book definitely covers more than just simple modules. Tying, overloading and OO are all covered. So is generating methods with Class::Struct and Class::MethodMaker. I also cover cross-platform module-building techniques, although I don't know if I hit on any of the problems you faced.

-sam