> >On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 09:05:39AM +0100, Alex McLintock wrote: > >> PS There is a new Manning book "graphics programming with perl" > >> > >> http://news.diversebooks.com/article.pl?sid=02/05/30/0754246 > >> > >> Shall we ask for a review copy?
>On 30/05/2002 at 10:06 +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote: > >No, instead Manning collectively should be lowered onto a rough-hewn > >wooden spike and sacrificially burnt to be set as an example to other > >would-be book publishing spammers who harvest addresses from www.pm.org. To defend Manning in this case I explicitly asked for their press releases as editor of http://news.DiverseBooks.com/ I know that they have asked various people to contribute to some perl books they are writing but that is separate from this instance. Their only crime so far is to use a perl website to find perl programmers, and then email them. Hardly a hanging offence.... PS http://news.diversebooks.com/article.pl?sid=02/05/27/1147220 Title: Data Munging With Perl Author: Dave Cross Publisher: Manning Format:Paperback Pages: 283 ISBN: 1930110006 Price: 36.95 USD Shop For It Reviewer: Alex McLintock It might be worth explaining "Data Munging". My mind translates this as "Data Massaging". I assume the term "munging" comes from the "Mung bean" which is used in chinese cookery by being squeezed into a paste and reformed into a variety of dumplings and cakes. Although I call myself a Java programmer nowadays there are many tasks for which perl is ideally suited. I use it for quick one off CGI scripts, process control on my unix boxes, and of course, data file manipulation or "munging". These are tasks where I don't go through the full software engineering process of requirements analysis, design, and specifications. I often just throw something together by writing perl-like pseudo code which only takes a short while to turn into running code. The proof of the pudding is that it runs and is easily testable. So what sort of things will this book help you improve? It starts off by pointing out some "best practice" rules which will help. These include telling the reader to decouple input, munging, and output processes, and use the unix filter model. Fine. The person reading this may not be a full time programmer, or a full time unix sys admin so these skills do need to be covered. However I would have thought unix tools so important that there should have been more investigation of tools like "sort", "uniq" and so on. I suppose the defence against such criticism is that you don't need the program "sort" or "uniq" if you can write it yourself in perl. Chapter three starts with sorting. This is the sort of thing I first used perl to do way back in 1995. Sorting is hard and choosing and building your sort keys is just part of the problem. The data sets I was dealing with quite often required temporary files and these weren't discussed much. It seemed like every example could be done in memory. Much of the rest of the chapter seemed to be a random selection of possibly useful topics. DBI for accessing databases, Data::Dumper for serialising data structures in perl, and writing short perl scripts on the command line. Chapter Four is all the good stuff in perl. Those pattern match facilities which look like so much noise on the line. Dave Cross makes an admirable effort at steering people away from regular expressions when not needed by pointing out some of the other useful facilities. 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. The example of how to use the modifier x to allow whitespace and thus comments is very good. Why don't we see examples like this more often? Chapter Five concerns unstructured data which is what I deal with most of all. It wasn't as detailed as I would have liked. It seemed to skip the process of turning unstructured data into structured data, which is a very difficult task. Chapters six, seven, and eight look at more and more structured data. This is where the meat of the problem lies. Tab delimited, comma separated, binary formats are all here. We then discuss popular the topics of html and XML in the last few chapters. I'll be passing this book on to one of my reviewers who is a beginner with perl. Let's see how well she copes with the book Alex Openweb Analysts Ltd, London: Software For Complex Websites http://www.OWAL.co.uk/ Free Consultancy for London Companies thinking of Open Source Software.
