Advanced Perl Programming, episode II

Well, I finally had some time to read through the electronic version of the book, and I am impressed with the effort invested and that I read through the second chapter (Parsing Techniques) with great dose of interest, given that I used to use lex and yacc and flex and bison. Combining those methods with perl already advanced regular expression processing can give really interesting results. Template modules are also interesting. I have yet to find a use for them, but it will come with practice.
There is one thing that I dislike: approach to databases. I am posting on this group for a very long time and I have a fairly detailed knowledge of one particular database and some level of knowledge of another one (PostgresSQL). This chapter I find to be much more of philosophical value then real value. The DBI book by Tim Bunce and Alligator Descartes is still unbeatable. Sure, they talk about object databases and various abstract topics but there is no real value for a database practitioner in that part.
Overall impression is very good. It doesn't cover the same topics as Srinivasan's book but is very good and useful book with larger portion of the book being actually useful then was the case with Srinivasan's book. The style is less dry and slightly better then Srinivasan's, at least in my opinion. That might not be worth very much, given the fact that my accent is visible from my writing, or so I am told. Be it as it may, I like the book. I like it a lot.

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Mladen Gogala
Oracle DBA

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Sat Jun 18 2005 - 04:08:14 CDT