Author: Steven Holzner
ISBN:
Publisher: Coriolis
Reviewed by: Mark Fowler
Summary: In conclusion, this book is a slightly flawed masterpiece, a potential master in the field that is sadly let down by a few omissions and factual errors that spoils an otherwise wonderful reference.
The Perl Black Book, 2nd Edition, is a hefty tome of twelve hundred or so pages that intends to be "as much of the whole Perl story as one book can hold". The publishers Coriolis are recommending a retail price of 41.99ukp a copy, making this seems like a good deal. Lets take a look at what we get for our money.
The format of the book is such that most chapters start with an "In Depth" section, which attempts to explain the general concepts and the whyforths of the issue that chapter explains. The bulk of the chapter is then padded out with an "Immediate Solutions" section that covers there whereforths in a brief quick fire "cookbook" like format of question...code example...answer.
This format is very readable, and working though the book is a lot less painful than one might expect for such a large number of pages, and the format also lends itself well to being an easily accessible reference book too. The cookbook like examples are illustrated with requests for further explanations from a fictitious supporting cast ranging from the 'novice programmer' to the 'programming correctness cazer'. These requests, and their corresponding answers, the author is able to provide both entertainment and much needed context to the examples.
Understanding Perl, more so than many other languages, is about understanding culture of the language. Things hang together because of common concepts and themes. The Perl Black Book does a reasonable job at writing down these unwritten rules and explaining not only how each of the functions work, but in what situation and why things work.
The one true Perl book, any Perl programmer will tell you, is the "Camel Book", Programming Perl by Larry Wall et al. The Perl Black Book does a good job of complementing The Camel Book; It's style is significantly different that, though containing mostly the same information, it is not superfluous. Indeed, programmers who have tried reading the Camel Book and found it less than agreeable may prefer the slightly more bite sized and practical approach of the Perl Black Book.
Despite all these great points the Perl Black Book is not without significant and worrying flaws. The most significant of these being the lack of "use strict" in the examples in the book. To its credit, the book does mention the pragma in all it's form several times, but in my opinion it does not mention it forcefully enough or in the right place (just after covering the "-w" switch for example.) For a beginner, the "use strict" pragma is a must (and indeed, for any professional) as it enforces good style and catches many common mistakes and typos that are otherwise hard to spot and frustrating to track down. Such treatment of the subject (or lack there of) by the book is almost unforgivable.
Other glaring stylistic mistakes that I would have though would have been caught by technical review are striking. The old technique of using typeglob aliasing for constants rather than the "use constant" directive (the book uses 5.6.1 where this is possible) is a good example. Worse, is where the book almost gets it right; For example the book advocates writing test scripts with module distributions - a good thing - but then seems to suggest you use the script to print out output which you then check by eye rather than using Test.pm (or any of the other testing modules) to print out the standard "ok" or "not ok" messages. Such an approach is likely to cause confusion with Test::Harness and make a beginner programmer wonder what they've done wrong when their module fails to pass it's tests.
More worrying are things that effect the security aspects of some of the advice. The section on CGI programming demonstrates serious security flaws. Environment variables are echoed unprotected to output of webpages (enabling cross-site scripting attacks allowing malicious people to commender such pages and use them to redirect traffic to their site and worse.) File based databases are not locked so multiple people accessing the website can cause writes to occur at the same time corrupting the data. Tainting is not covered. At least the code uses CGI.pm!
One of the reasons the book may be so brief on such critical areas is that the book does cover an extraordinary range of topics. The included material on Tk is a more than reasonable primer on GUI programming in Perl (a section missed by many other books.) The section on XML includes a fair amount of info on the basics of DOM and SAX processing techniques. Other subjects are treated worse; The SOAP discussion amounts to outputting custom XML and would be much better replaced by a discussion of the SOAP::Lite module. The WML section is somewhat lacking on important issues and a programmer would be much better off with Martin Frost's Learning WML and WMLScript book. Most notable by it's complete absence is anything on DBI, the Perl Database Interface that allows Perl to communicate with SQL driven databases.
In conclusion the question is: Would I recommend this book to someone learning Perl? Tough call. Maybe. I would to someone who didn't like any of the excellent O'Reilly or Manning books. I certainly wouldn't hesitate to recommend a third edition of this book in which the errors and omissions corrected - the format and general coverage is very appealing, as is the quality of explanation. Until such an issue is published I'm going to have to refrain from drawing any conclusions such.