Book Information
|
|
Book Reviews
Review by Shlomi Fish, November 2003
The book as a whole is written well and contains some useful information, especially for people who are not very knowledgable in the subject. The style is light and semi-informal which makes for a very easy and enjoyable read.
The first chapter of the book introduces the reader to CPAN and how to effectively use it. It is a good introduction, but did not teach me a lot of new things.
The second chapter covers the basics of writing Perl modules. I skipped this chapter because I evaluated myself as familiar enough with these technicalities. If you'd read it, you'd be able to comment on how well it explained things you already know. That's often valuable in book reviews.
The third chapter covers some guidelines for good modules design and implementation. I found this chapter very good as well, and may have learned a few things from it.
The fourth chapter covers the technicalities of building a CPAN Module distribution. Here, I learned several new things which I did not already know, some of which will make my life much easier in the future.
The fifth chapter covers sumitting the module to CPAN, which basically covered the PAUSE technicalities. It was also quite good, but did not renew much to me.
The sixth chapter covers module maintenance and the seventh one overviews some great CPAN modules. They are both quite good.
I skipped the next three chapters because they dealt with writing C extensions. This is due to the fact I'm now reading "Extending and Embedding Perl " which covers the topic more thoroughly. The last chapter ("CGI Application Modules for CPAN") introduces the reader to the CGI::Application module and how to effectively use it. It was good, and I finally, understood what CGI::Application was all about. I was a bit disappointed by the book, because I expected to find some very high wisdom on writing CPAN modules. But I guess no such thing exists besides what the book covers, and so the entry level to becoming a good CPAN contributor is lower. So, all in all, a great book.