Sebastopol, CA--In its first five years of existence, The Perl Journal
(TPJ) ran 247 articles by more than 120 authors. Every serious Perl
programmer subscribed to it, and every notable Perl guru jumped at the
opportunity to write for it. TPJ explained critical topics such as
regular expressions, databases, and object-oriented programming, and
demonstrated Perl's utility for fields as diverse as astronomy,
biology, economics, AI, and games. The magazine gave birth to both the
Obfuscated Perl Contest and the Perl Poetry Contest, and remains a
proud and timeless achievement of Perl during one of its most exciting
periods of development.
Much to the sorrow of scores of Perl programmers, TPJ no longer exists
in printed form. A new O'Reilly release, Computer Science and Perl
Programming (US $39.95), is the first volume of The Best of the Perl
Journal series, compiled and re-edited by the original editor and
publisher of The Perl Journal, Jon Orwant. In this series, the very
best (and still relevant) articles published in TPJ over its five years
of publication are immortalized in three volumes. This first volume has
70 articles devoted to hard-core computer science, advanced programming
techniques, and the underlying mechanics of Perl.
"Perl is something of a grab bag," says editor Jon Orwant, "and so is
this book. These articles are the creme de la creme of the articles
published during The Perl Journal's five-year existence. This book has
41 different authors. The articles within each section are loosely
ordered from general to specific, and also from simplest to most
complex, but since these spectra are not one and the same, the
progression is not always uniform. The book can be read straight
through, or sampled at random. In deference to the Perl motto, There's
More Than One Way To Read It."
"The Perl Journal is about the experience of programming--the fun, the
tricks, the surprising facts uncovered, and the neat new ideas," says
Sean M. Burke, a TPJ writer. "Think of The Perl Journal as a thick lush
oasis in a wasteland of bone-dry acronyms and stick-figure theories."
Here are just a few of the topics covered in the book:
- Jeffrey Friedl on understanding Regexes
- Mark Jason Dominus on optimizing your Perl programs with Memoization
- Damian Conway on Parsing
- Tim Meadowcroft on integrating Perl with Microsoft Office
Written by 41 of the most prominent and prolific members of the
closely-knit Perl community, this anthology does what no other book
can, giving unique insight into the real-life applications and powerful
techniques made possible by Perl.
"Perl programmers are some of the smartest folks around," explains Jon
Orwant. "They're not interested in writing about boring stuff, but
rather showing the generality or applicability of their latest
hack--whether it's using Perl to decode the human genome or to create
artificially intelligent software robots. So TPJ was always more
interesting than typical computer language magazines, and as a result
there continues to be great demand for most of the articles. When I
published the magazine, over half the readers ordered every single back
issue so that they'd have a complete collection. Since those back
issues aren't available any more, the O'Reilly TPJ anthologies are
dearly needed."
Other books tell you how to use Perl, but this book goes far beyond
that: it shows you not only how to use Perl, but what you could use
Perl *for*. This is more than just The Best of the Perl Journal--in
many ways, this is the best of Perl.
Additional Resources:
Computer Science & Perl Programming: Best of The Perl Journal
0-596-00310-2, Order Number: 3102
758 pages, $39.95 (US) $61.95 (CA)
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
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