TorgoX writes "Linguistlist has a lukewarm review of Mike Hammond's Programming for Linguists: Perl for Language Researchers from Blackwell Publishing."
Re:Blackwell goes tech
rob_au on 2003-06-25T22:35:17
Perhaps this explains the mediocre opinion of this book expressed by the reviewer - It may simply be that Blackwell doesn't yet have the technical editors or reviewers required to ensure that the book is sufficient technical, targetted and not repeating information already available or better covered in existing references (which from my reading of the review were the major gripes of the reviewer). If this is the case, then no doubt Blackwell will benefit greatly from well written reviews such as that linked.[ On a side note, the first line of this comment did originally read 'Perhaps this explains the mediocre review of this book' but then realised that this could be misinterpreted - The review was quite thorough and excellent. I felt that this sentence warranted review given that the review is of a linguistic text and that I had best ensure that my prose was absolutely correct, else be rightfully admonished
:-) ] Re:Blackwell goes tech
allolex on 2003-07-01T18:13:20
An interesting note. =)
I think there was one important gripe that you missed: the lack of focus on multilingual processing and internationalization. This is something that is very important to many linguists (I daresay a majority), but which may not be evident even to a technical editor who has no experience in dealing with non-English alphabets.
Consider this code (replace5.pl), mentioned in the review and available here
open F, $ARGV[0] or die "Oops!\n";
while ($line = <F>) {
$line =~ tr/\341\351\355\363\372/aeiou/;
print $line;
}
close F;
(I won't even start on unnecessary use of filehandles...)
If this is the extent of his foray into international support, then the book might be more accurately retitled Programming for Linguists: Perl for English Language Researchers
