A present he liked. He will spend a lot of time with it for a while!.
Do not buy this book. Not really worth it.
Imagine that chromatic were to write a professional once-a-week blog for the span of about two years, with edits and ideas from Damian Conway and Curtis "Ovid" Poe, focusing on cool Perl tricks. The result would look very similar to the Perl Hacks book.
Perl is my workhorse language. I've written more Perl code, both personally and professionally, than any other language I've learned.
From the title, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Perl Hacks. Was it going to be about rummaging around in Perl's internals?
I received this book as a token of appreciation for my contributions to the 2006 Perl Advent Calendar. It's the first book I read as part of the O'Reilly Hacks' series of books, and it proved to be a light yet informative and entertaining read.
To be completely honest, this isn't the book I thought it was going to be. Most O'Reilly Hacks books start off pretty simply and in a few chapters take you to the further reaches of their subject area.
In a time when new computer languages are dime a dozen, perl unquestionably retains its beauty. Keeping with the philosophy of perl - there is more than one way to do it - the book shows you ingenious ways to work with this powerful language.
If your a serious Perl programmer or a long-time Perl scripter whose looking to broaden your horizons then this is an excellent book. Surprisingly, this is really a Perl book for professional Perl developers, sys-admins, and scripters.
Perl hacks is an intriguing book which explores specific problems and their quite practical solutions. This book is easy to dive in and out of.
This book is for experienced working Perl programmers - most likely system administrators but not necessarily - that need working solutions to real problems you'll most likely find in the workplace. There are a few diversions into such "cute" ideas as building animations in Perl, but most of these hacks are for the working programmer who is looking for ways to automate processes, build interfaces that don't get in the way of developers, and thoroughly test and simulate code.
I've learned enough from the first two chapters along to justify the price of this book. Even if you are an intermediate Perl programmer, this book has various tidbits that will improve your code.
