Perl Cookbook

Find a Perl programmer, and you'll find a copy of "Perl Cookbook" nearby. "Perl Cookbook" is a comprehensive collection of problems, solutions, and practical examples for anyone programming in Perl. The book contains hundreds of rigorously reviewed Perl "recipes" and thousands of examples ranging from brief one-liners to complete applications.

The second edition of "Perl Cookbook" has been fully updated for Perl 5.8, with extensive changes for Unicode support, I/O layers, mod_perl, and new technologies that have emerged since the previous edition of the book. Recipes have been updated to include the latest modules. New recipes have been added to every chapter of the book, and some chapters have almost doubled in size.

Covered topic areas include:

Manipulating strings, numbers, dates, arrays, and hashes

Pattern matching and text substitutions

References, data structures, objects, and classes

Signals and exceptions

Screen addressing, menus, and graphical applications

Managing other processes

Writing secure scripts

Client-server programming

Internet applications programming with mail, news, ftp, and telnet

CGI and mod_perl programming

Web programming

Since its first release in 1998, "Perl Cookbook" has earned its place in the libraries of serious Perl users of all levels of expertise by providing practical answers, code examples, and mini-tutorials addressing the challenges that programmers face. Now the second edition of this bestselling book is ready to earn its place among the ranks of favorite Perl books as well.

Whether you're a novice or veteran Perl programmer, you'll find "Perl Cookbook," 2nd Edition to be one of the most usefulbooks on Perl available. Its comfortable discussion style and accurate attention to detail cover just about any topic you'd want to know about. You can get by without having this book in your library, but once you've tried a few of the recipes, you won't want to.

When the second edition of Programming Perl was released, the authors omitted two chapters: "Common Tasks with Perl" and "Real Perl Programs." Publisher O'Reilly & Associates soon realized that there would be too many pages in Programming Perl if it put updated recipes in the new edition. Instead, O'Reilly chose to release the many Perl code examples as a separate entity: The Perl Cookbook.

The recipes are well documented and the examples aren't too arcane; even beginners will be able to pick up the lessons taught here. The authors write in relatively easy-to-understand language (for a technical guide). Through this book and its arsenal of recipes, you will learn many new things about Perl to help you through your toughest projects. The next time you're working on a project at 2 a.m., you'll thank yourself for the guidance and direction The Perl Cookbook provides. --Doug Beaver