Book Review: Wicked Cool Perl Scripts

The book is written as a compilation of useful Perl scripts to solve difficult problems as has been mentioned along with the title itself. One of the important assumptions of the author is that the reader of this book is up to the level of intermediate Perl programmer to be able to find their way through Perl programming language at least above the elementary levels. The scripts range in difficulty from the intermediate to the advanced programmer in searching the corners of this language to perform better. The book is spread across eleven chapters viz: General Purpose Utilities, Website Management, CGI debugging, CGI programs,Internet Data mining,Unix System Administration,Picture Utilities, Games and Learning Tools, Development Tools,Mapping and Regular Expression Grapher.

The first program of this book is about writing a Perl program to use the Plain Old Documentation(POD) feature of Perl to describe themselves. The program uses perldoc command of the Perl distribution for printing the documentation when the --help is seen on the screen. There is the original idea of using hash functions for performing simple file comparisons.

The second chapter in Website Management has the scripts to ease the routine work of the web master such as checking the status of links on their website, an Orphan file checker using the File::Find module to figure out any orphan pages and tackling hackers.

The third chapter gives some ideas on using Perl to debug CGI programs. These include the Display error log program using the CGI::Carp module and interactive debugging of a CGI Program built using the Perl module Devel::ptkdb.

The fourth chapter gives the tips for using Perl to create small and robust CGI form handlers such as a guest book, errata submission form, etc. The fifth chapter discusses Perl programs for grabbing web pages and sifting through the data to generate relevant information Finance::Quote module to get the financial quotes, downloading comics or web page with content. Next chapter gives out the programs such as fixing bad file names, mass file renaming, checking symbolic links, etc.

Seventh chapter dishes out programs for using and manipulating pictures stored on the computer. The scripts discussed in this chapter are useful for the avid photographer (and a Perl programmer, too!) with loads of photographs on the hard disk. Programs such as making a photo gallery and card maker are discussed using primarily the Image::Magick module amongst the others.

The next chapter is about building games using Perl and a bit of ingenuity such as Teaching a Toddler, etc. The programs in next chapter explain why Perl is ideal for accelerating the development process of C,C++ and Java by performing some mechanical tasks. One of the useful programs in this chapter is the dead code locator which uses the nm command functionality to sift out symbols which are defined but not used. The Programs in the tenth and eleventh chapters are for definitely for the advanced Perl programmer.

The Mapping chapter discusses the programs which are used to manipulate the display of maps as per user requirement and inputs and the like. The last chapter gives out the ideas to graph a regular expression and use cryptic regular expressions. There are extensive programs crossing 700-800 lines which perform the graphing of regular expressions. These are really fodder for the devoted Perl programmer.

One of the important points about this book is that majority of the programs have been written with Linux in mind. This would mean at least some bit of rewriting and reworking the programs for those studying this book with non-Linux systems. However the logic of the program would be needed to rework for the other OS typicalities. One of the example is the use of ps command output. This has been used in the chapter on system administration utilities and would need the type of effort on part of the reader on different OS as mentioned earlier.

The book covers a fairly large ground in raising the interest of the programmer in Perl language to perform difficult tasks effectively and with understanding of what are the possibilities with Perl. With in depth output analysis and hacks for each program in this book provided by the author, this book is a must read for the professional Perl programmer.

The web site includes the downloadable code for programs in this book.