Press releases

"Perl Cookbook, Second Edition": Favorite Perl Recipes for Every Occasion

Press release: September 3, 2003

Sebastopol, CA--Find a Perl programmer, and you'll find a copy of the "Perl Cookbook" nearby. The book may not be known by the animal on its cover--like the Camel book ("Programming Perl") or the Llama book ("Learning Perl")--but the reason for that is clear: as with any favorite cookbook, you'll find it propped open on a desk or table, well-thumbed and marked up, its cover seldom visible.

Since its first release in 1998, the "Perl Cookbook" has earned its place in the libraries of serious Perl users of all levels of expertise--from beginners to the most experienced--by providing practical answers, code examples, and mini-tutorials that address the challenges that programmers face. Now the Perl Cookbook, Second Edition (O'Reilly, US $49.95) by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington is sure to earn its place among the ranks of favorite Perl books as well.

Updated for Perl 5.8, the new edition of the "Perl Cookbook" has been expanded to cover new features in Perl itself as well as new technologies that have emerged since the first edition. Two new chapters have been added and many existing chapters have been expanded. In all, eighty new recipes have been added and more than one hundred older recipes have been updated to include new modules or techniques.

As with the first edition, "Perl Cookbook, Second Edition" covers data manipulation (strings, numbers, dates, arrays, and hashes), file I/O, regular expressions, modules, references, objects, data structures, signal processing, database processing, graphical applications, interprocess communication, security, internet programming, CGI, and LWP. In addition, the book includes:

  • Coverage of Unicode character handling in Perl

  • A new chapter devoted to mod_perl, an Apache module that embeds Perl into the Apache web server

  • New and updated recipes covering modules now included in the Perl core distribution

  • A new chapter on processing XML

"Perl Cookbook" has been called the most useful book ever written on Perl. It teaches programming in the most immediate way by showing how things are done by the experts, and then explaining why they work. The "Perl Cookbook" isn't a book about the Perl programming language; it's a book about how to program in Perl.

Praise for the previous edition:

"'The Perl Cookbook' is an amazing catalog of recipes that allows even beginning Perl programmers to figure out solutions to their problems and get their work done. No stone is left unturned as Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington explain common problems that a Perl programmer might run into."
--Doug Beaver, amazon.com, December 1998

"While the language's (Perl's) motto might be, 'There's more than one way to do it,' beginners and harassed web site administrators would often be happy to be shown just one, so long as it worked. Enter the 'Perl Cookbook.' The writing is clear, concise, and thankfully free from in-jokes, and the index and 'see also' links always led me to the answers I wanted with a minimum of fuss and backtracking. If only it was small enough to carry around without backstrain."
--Gregory V. Wilson, Dr. Dobbs Journal, February 1999.

"Precious few books can meet the needs of novices and experts simultaneously. The 'Perl Cookbook' does, and on nearly every page. It has the perfect mix of instruction, revelation, and attitude--exactly what I expected from Tom and Nat, pillars of the Perl Community."
--Jon Orwant, editor of "The Perl Journal"

Further reviews of the first edition

Additional Resources:

Perl Cookbook, Second Edition
Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington
ISBN 0-596-00313-7, 927 pages, $49.95 US, $77.95 CA, 35.50 UK
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938; 1-707-827-7000

About O’Reilly

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