Found this mostly finished on my HD. Finished it off and thought I'd post it -
I think someone may have already posted a review of this, though.
Ben
=head1 NAME
Graphics Programming With Perl
=head1 Author
Martien Verbruggen
=head1 ISBN
1-930110-02-2
=head1 REVIEW
On the face of it, the subject matter leads a lot to be desired. Perl
is not the best choice of language for the sorts of operations that
graphics seem to require.
As the author notes, however ,the ability to leverage meaty XS extensions
allows Perl to gain much of the low-level power and speed of C. This enables
the Perl module-writer to compensate for the overly-meta way in which Perl
often deals with binary data.
For the most part, Verbruggen deals with his subject matter very well. The
opening chapters cover basic graphics concepts, colour spaces, formats, etc
and help set the tone for the rest. It is clear that this book is intended
as a jumping-off point and a cookbook, rather than a reference guide or
authorative tome.This is something of a shame as Verbruggen's style is open
and easy to read, so a reference section written by him would likely have
been readable and usable.
In addition, much of the focus is around web-based graphics but that surely
just reflects the needs of its target audience. Virtually all of the second
part of the book is taken up with discussing the sort of effects and graphics
creation a web programmer might want to achieve.
In practice, on reading it, I found quite a bit of the coverage to be
somewhat superficial. The major models have their simple operations
well-covered, but there was little of the special knowledge or detail of
the quirks and secrets that can really mark a tech book out as very special.
On the upside, the issues of version numbering and nasty dependency hell
(which have often beset my oiwn experiences with Perl and graphics) are very
well-handled and would doubtless save a less-experienced programmer a lot
of heartache.
The occasional shallowness of the material is my only real concern about this
book. In particular, I found the discussion of the Gimp rather disappointing
and that the author rather dropped the ball on SDL. The Simple Direct media
Layer has opened the possibility of entire graphics-heavy applications being
written in Perl, and would have been an ideal candidate for a chapter. In
addition, some discussion as to why an application designer might want to
employ the direct methods of OpenGL while within a windowing environment
would have been interesting, given the poor coverage it has received in
several other recent books.
One other nit was the authors somewhat peculiar dialect of Perl. Possibly
this should have been caught at the tech reviewing stage, but very little
of the example Perl in the book will run on a Perl earlier than 5.6.0 - but in
most cases this is just because the author uses 'our' liberally. This directly
contradicts the discussion in the introduction about Perl versions, which is
very bad.
The dialect has other peculiarities as well - bare filehandles instead of IO::*
modules, extensive use of the CGI module - despite its known systemic problems
with memory leaks, insistence on methods being available as class or instance
methods wherever possible, but then introducing possibly troubling calling
semantics by passing @_ unmodified by delegation, use of @ISA instead of
'use base', using the -w switch instead of scoping warnings, etc.
The book also contains some factual errors - for example Macromedia do *not*
require a license fee for software which produces SWF files unless it contains
derived code from their reference implementation.
Like some of the other works in the Manning stable, this book suffers at times
from being neither fish nor fowl - failing to provide enough reference
material for longevity, but sometimes requiring too much background. Hopefully,
a second edition would allow more space for the reference section this book
deserves.
Despite this, in many ways Verbruggen provides a charming introduction to
the topic of graphics and Perl. He covers some interesting modules which may
have been unknown to the reader and the book should be an excellent read
for the intermediate programmer with an interest in graphics.
