From: Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com>
Subject: REVIEW: Perl: The Programmer's Companion
Date: 13 Jun 1998 21:34:03 GMT

Perl: The Programmers Companion, by Nigel Chapman and published by Jon
Wiley and Sons, is hereby awarded the coveted rating of 5 Camels on the
Camel Critiques page found at http://www.perl.com/perl/critiques/

Here's the review included there: 

                 Review of Perl: The Programmer's Companion

 Title:       Perl: The Programmer's Companion
 ISBN         0 471 97563 X
 Author:      Nigel Chapman
 Publisher:   John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.
 Pages:       268pp + xii
 Size:        9 1/8" × 7 1/2" × 3/4"
 Price:       US $29.95
 Rating:      5 out of 5 possible camels -- Terrific!

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Capsule Review

This small, delightful book published by John Wiley and Sons is just book
for the accomplished programmer who wants to learn Perl. It is not only free
of technical errors, it is a pleasure to read. You will laugh a lot. This is
not a book about Unix, about systems administration, or about the web.
Rather, it is about Perl as a serious programming langauge.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Longer Description

I give it five camels. Yup, that's what I said. I may be waxing overly
ecstatic. I've only spot checked it so far, but with delight. But it sure
looks terrific. Everything I looked at was right on the money technically,
even scoping, which no one ever ever gets right. It's a tiny, no frills, no
crap book. With a touch of whimsey.

Here are excerpts:

     The aim of this book is to introduce programmers to Perl, and Perl
     to programmers. It offers an invitation to look at a programming
     language that is different from the everyday ones, and can save
     you an awful lot of time and programming effort. [...]

     Perl: The Programmer's Companion is not a tutorial on computer
     programming. It is a book aimed at people who already know
     something--possibly quite a lot--about programming, and at least a
     little about computer science. [...] I also assume that you enjoy
     programming computers, even if you find that these days you don't
     have much time for the enjoyable bits.

     Perl: The Programmer's Companion differs from most other offerings
     on the same subject by being written by someone who doesn't mind
     being described as a computer scientist. It is customary for
     computer scientists to treat Perl as an aberration and to ignore
     it as much as possible. Perl enthusiasts, for their part, tend to
     treat computer scientists with scorn, and accuse them of being
     detached from the real world, and generally no fun.

     I hope that this book may do something to reconcile the two
     factions, by showing that Perl is a worthy object of anyone's
     attention, and that a broader computer science viewpoint can
     provide some context for understanding and making judgements about
     Perl.

     There appear to be two views of what Perl is. One school of
     thought, based on the fact that Perl was born to Unix, inherits
     many features from the Unix shells and tools like sed and awk, and
     has a high level of support for interacting with that operating
     system built in to it, holds that it is primarily a Unix system
     administration tool.

     The other school of thought holds that Perl is a general-purpose
     programming languages, whose slightly unusual nature should not
     prevent it being taken as seriously as C++, Modula-3, or Java.

     This book is based on the second view.

The epilogue is really worth raving about. I can't repro it here. It's a
coffee shop dialogue on theory versus practice, and what we programmers have
been doing wrong a long time. I wonder whether Larry wrote it
pseudonymously. :-)

The book is written by a fellow from in the UK. Malcolm was the technical
reviewer. The English is well-formed, perhaps even literate; in fact, his
level of prose is going to leave the Perl for Dummies and CGI
wannaprogrammerbees crying and confused. :-)

--tom
-- 
    I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in perl.    :-)
                    --Larry Wall in <7865@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>