Perl Cookbook, Second Edition

• #9 in Best Perl Books

109 Reviews

Sort by: Most Helpful ▲ Date Rating

Sometimes I think either Tim O'Reilly or Tom Christiansen knows what I am thinking.

In the past week alone, I can count half a dozen times I have wondered about ways to do things in Perl, and never once have I failed to get either a full solution or a running start from the information in this book. If you have read Learning Perl by Christiansen and Schwartz (and if you haven't, you probably should before tackling this one), then this is your next step on the road to Perl.

This book contains hundreds of examples of solutions to "How do I..." type problems using Perl. Ranging from core language topics like hashes, sorting, and string and array processing, to files, database access, IPC, and brief but useful sections on Web and CGI usage, there is something here for everyone who does things with Perl.

Each chapter contains at least a dozen 'recipes' for solving a particular problem in a particular context. Each recipe is neatly laid out with a brief description of the problem, a proposed solution, and a follow-up discussion section. I especially appreciated the discussions, as they maintain the plurality of Perl--the proposed solutions work, but the discussion area almost invariably also includes alternate approaches or techniques. That's the beauty of Perl (and its motto)--There's More Than One Way To Do It. This book offers the intermediate programmer years of experience in solving real world problems using Perl in a few hundred, easy to read pages.

If you have learned enough about Perl to get started, the next thing you should do is get this book. So get cooking!

After dog-earring (sic) the pages of the first edition of Programming Perl (the Camel book), I quickly glommed on to the second edition, thinking that they'll have even more informed narrative and great examples. The enhanced narrative WAS worth purchase of the second edition, but, as mentioned in the Amazon.com review, the "Command Tasks with Perl" and "Real Perl Programs" chapters had been dropped... it's been the closest I've ever come to letter-bombing a book publisher. Little did we know that there was a cunning plan by the Perl wizards and O'Reilly to produce The Perl Cookbook.

While in this world of instant communication some say that two years was a long time to wait for the Cookbook, the wait was definitely worth it. The Cookbook is a treasure trove of examples, and should be considered a mandatory companion to Programming Perl AND Advanced Perl Programming on the bookshelf of intermediate and advanced perl programmers.

The Cookbook is also a great place for the novice to feed after cutting their teeth on Learning Perl. Each section is a mini-tutorial with nice examples to enter and ponder. Combined with the Camel book as general background and reference, you'll go a long way in finding quick solutions to common problems.

I'm not sure what was the problem of one reviewer regarding typographical errors. I've been using the first edition of the Cookbook, and have not encountered any serious difficulties. It seems that any typographical errors (and I haven't seen any, but then I haven't been looking) would have at worst lost one star in rating the Cookbook. Benefits of the Cookbook seem to far outweigh the nits on which this reviewer has focused. I do agree with the reviewer's final note: buy copies from the second and third printings, as I'm sure the first edition has already sold out! (... and some perl book geek will view this as an opportunity to collect a "first edition.")

It's not often I'm moved to write an online review. The Perl Cookbook is a superb reference for any serious perl programmer and especially for the novice and intermediate wanting to improve their skills. Buy this book! Bon appetit!

I have owned this book for over a year and still use it regularly. While I was learning Perl syntax I found that it served very well when language guides such as "Programming Perl" fell short. When I started using the language I didn't have the syntax totally mastered and came across various little questions and problems. The "Perl Cookbook" addressed both of these by providing succinct solutions to my problems while helping me learn more about Perl syntax.

Furthermore, this book exposes you to the various Perl modules available in a more natural way than searching for them in a general language reference like "Perl in a Nutshell". Most recipies in the book present a simple code solution and then refer to a module that provides the same (and often extended) functionality.

I have had experience in the language for a few months now. The only reason I even started learning Perl was because I was intrigued with programming CGI. I bought "Programming Perl" and enjoyed it as a beginners reference but was left hanging as where to turn next. I picked up 2-3 other books, specifically for web programming with Perl, but they all did not get into topics besides basic form parsing, etc and the information was repeatative from book to book. I finally found this book and it has answered all my questions and cleared all my confusions with my CGI scripts. It has a lot of good examples/scripts with helpful subroutines. I use them in almost every CGI script I program now because of their ease of use and accuracy. There were a few minor mistakes in their code (perhaps a test to see if you can debug their scripts using your new knowledge ) that kept it from getting a perfect 10 but 9.5 is good enough anyways. Don't hesitate to buy it as it is probably the most used and most valuable Perl book on the market!

(Not recommended unless you have basic knowledge of Perl)

I had a roommate in college who could learn programming languages by reading the language specifications. He took Advanced Algebra as an elective and blew the curve for the math majors. Corey went after the theory in everything. Once he understood the theory, he could extrapolate the applications.

I'm just the opposite. The theory doesn't mean squat to me until I can see a few examples. Give me enough examples, and I can extrapolate the theory.

If you're like me, this book is for you. 733 pages containing 334 examples of how to use Perl to solve virtually any programming problem you can think of. And as you examine the solutions to the various problems, you're introduced to successively more and more advanced Perl programming constructs.

In short, outstanding book.

In the past, I've had a bad experience with Cookbook-styles. One example would be a "CGI/Perl Cookbook". But this one is nothing like its counterpart.

To be able to follow the cookbook, you're expected to have a basic knowledge of Perl, Perl data structures and IO filehandles. The rest is "in order to get there, do like this, because of that" - style. Very easy to follow, very concise and at the same time informative. What you will appreciate the most of this book is, it doesn't just give you a solution, but it also teaches you the solution.

The book consists of 20 chapters, each chapter dedicated to a distinct subject, such as Strings, Numbers, Dates and Times, Arrays, Hashes, Pattern Matching, File access, File Contends and so on. Each chapter, consists of smaller sections, called "Receipts". Each receipt is dedicated to a solution of one commonly encountered real-life problem.

For example, Receipt 8.6, "Picking a Random Line from a File" introduces the problem , gives a very elegant solution: "rand($.) < 1 && ($line=$_) while <>", and provides a one page exciting description of the algorithm, followed by references.

Although I've been involved in Perl extensively for the last 3 years, I still catch myself skimming through the receipts to compare my solutions to that of the book. Frequently I end up discovering something new and exciting.

The book is definitely of value. Any Perl programmer should have it.

More books like these should be written for all popular languages. This is by far the most used book for me when I started to learn and program using Win32 Perl. I've not run into any problems with programming in the Win32 environment with this book. The second most used book is "Perl in a Nutshell," also by O'Reilly. But if there's a problem I have, I reach for this book first. 700+ pages packed with solutions and explanations of those solutions to many common problems. Most of the time, you'll find something in there to get you started if it doesn't solve your problem outright. There are whole sections for solving problems with:

Strings
Numbers
Date and Times
Arrays
Hashes
Pattern Matching
File Access
File Contents
Directories
Subroutines
References and Records
Packages, Libraries and Modules
Classes, Objects and Ties
Database Access
User Interface
Process AManagement and Communication
Sockets
Internet Services
CGI Programming
Web Automation

That's 20 sections in all! Get the book and stop suffering while looking for answers to your Perl problems. This book easily saved a month's worth of my time during a 4 month project. Plus, it saved me from writing inefficient code simply because I was new to the language and didn't know the tricks that can be used for such a wonderful language.

This is my favourite Perl book. Read the first two sections of Programming Perl, any section that deals with references, skim the rest, and start browsing the Perl Cookbook. The presentation of the varied problems and their solutions is wonderful and instructive. Most programming professors in college are neither as good at instruction, nor as pragmaticly helpful. If all you want is a book to swipe code from, don't bother; most of the book will be just extra weight. All the free code you want is on the net.

Get this book, but get this book because with each problem and solution set is a discussion of why the solution works, other solutions that are possible, and when to look toward a more robust and/or complex answer. Each chapter has ten or twenty pages that are dedicated to the programming bailiwick the chapter explores. The answers are well commented, and syntatic suggar is explained. The writing is not terribly dense, and a good sense of flow is maintained through out the book. This is one of the few technical books I own that I can just sit down and read for hours on end w/o getting bored or loosing steam.

I cannot praise this book enough. My copy is dog-eared, looks like it's been through a bad land war in SE Asia, and has tiny yellow post-its with titles marking sections I found particularly interesting or useful. With The Perl Cookbook, Programming Perl, Effective Perl Programming, Advanced Perl Programming, and Mastering Regular Expression (ack.), there are few situations a programmer can't handle. Buy this book, NOW!

When I first looked at this book, it seemed like a good idea. Perl is sufficiently arcane for there to be lot's of simple solutions that will not be immediately obvious. However, the book has two major faults. It is too thick, and it is too specific.

What I had hoped for was something like "Design Patterns", but for Perl. But instead of trying to generalize, this book tries to list every specific problem that the beginning Perl programmer is likely to meet. For that reason it is unreadable. Any real insight is bound to get hidden in between dozens of trivial tasks. And when you actually meet some problem you think would be a good idea to look up, it is unlikely to be exactly the same as the authors envisioned (why not simply write a library instead?).

With the general incompetence level in the IT-sector during the dot-com bubble, it is possible this book needed to exist, but today it seems like a monument of stupidity, a useless reference that will catch dust forever.

I love Perl. I am almost obsessed with it. I have even left love messages for my wife in the mirror written in the best Perl I can manage. That's not to say that I am a Perl expert--not by any means. I think I shall forever remain a student as there is always more to learn. I am always searching for the latest Perl tidbit and I usually turn first to an O'Reilly book. One of the latest publications to come from O'Reilly on the subject of Perl is the second edition of the Perl Cookbook. Five years have passed since the last edition was published and a lot has changed in that short time span.

For those of you looking to improve your physique without leaving your desk, you'll find hefting this latest edition better suited to the task. It's about 200 pages thicker and about 543 pounds heavier. Okay, so the weight is an exaggeration. There are 80 new recipes (and two new chapters) covering technologies such as Unicode, XML and mod_perl. Even if you own a copy of the first edition, you will find the new recipes and the updated recipes of great value.

For those of you unfamiliar The Perl Cookbook, you will discover a rich treasure trove of excellent solutions to vexing problems. While the Perl Cookbook won't teach you the basics of Perl, beginners can benefit from not having to reinvent the wheel for addressing common tasks such as sorting, traversing, printing or deleting hashes. Advanced Perl Mongers may find the updated discussion on process management, object orientation and module creation enlightening.

The Second Edition of the Perl Cookbook will be coming out in two months (August 2003). I always like to know this before buying a book. This does not mean that this new edition will be better than the original, just something buyers should be aware of.

It's like I have found Perl enlightenment and the answer key to an exam I'm unprepared to take all in the same source.

This book scales to almost any user level, and is quite instructive. It is also a great reference guide to answer those "How do I...?" questions.

Buy it now, you'll be glad you did. :)

This book is filled with great examples by very experienced authors, which will not only show you how to do that exact thing you want to, but also point you to the Perl ways of solving problems.

As any other cookbook it's not intended for complete beginners (If you are a beginner look at "Learning Perl" by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and Brian D Foy), but rather for programmers with some experience in Perl.

This book is a great recipe book which will spare you a lot of issues if you keep it at your hand while coding.

Invaluable text that offers quick and varied solutions to the most common perl tasks. I like the variety of solutions; generally the first one they suggest is the one of the ideas you'll have had for solving the problem; then they refine it into most robust, idiomatic perl, which means you have the option of learning how the pros do it.

Oh, and the index is well laid out, which is absolutely essential in the must-finish-this-program-by-tonite sort of book that this is.

This is easily the most useful computer book I've used. I refer to the Cookbook constantly, and it shows--the binding has come undone and the cover is falling off.

I would actually recommend purchasing this before Programming Perl, and after Learning Perl. The recipes provide quick solutions to common problems, but each recipe (and each chapter) includes a tremendous amount of background information and gloss. The wisdom of this approach is especially apparent if you take a look at the recently released PHP Developer's Cookbook.

Buy it.

I thought I would use this book, but I rarely do. If you are the kind that appreciates using working examples and fitting them for your own uses, then maybe this book is for you. If you are prone to reinventing the wheel (like myself), you'll need more advanced Perl texts that go over tips and tricks as well as explanations themselves.

Many people use the internet to download working examples of Perl applications and scripts, then modify them for their own needs. I think this book was written with these people in mind. I just haven't needed this book -- or if I have needed it, its format and purpose is not one I can get my mind around.

My name is Nicholas Maietta, and I am one of the PERL and CGI programmers at Scapps.com, an online community of programmers for Santa Cruz, California's Online community. I just recently started using the PERL language early this year, but found that surfing around for "free scripts" wasn't going to help me much. I also needed to setup a web-based email retrieval system, and for many months, I couldn't find the right answers, untill I ran accross this book. I was willing to pay $900 for server software to do the same thing that I needed to do, but found all the answers in the book. Much appreciation goes to the people who wrote it!

Soon after I bought this book, it's been on my desk anytime I'm writing Perl code. It provides a fast way of getting straight to the code samples perfectly suitable for most tasks one might need to incorporate in Perl script. That much you could expect from a "cookbook".

What makes this book brilliant is that it supports the idea of "learn as you go", the very reason many programmers turned to Perl. You don't need to know every feature of the language in order to produce powerful Perl programs. What you need in most cases is in-depth knowledge of the area you're focusing on. That's exactly where "Perl Cookbook" saves the day!

Well organized set of solutions each followed with comprehensive analysis I enjoyed reading and greatly benefited from.

This is a first and best of the O'Reilly cookbooks. A few people have told me, "I don't know Perl, I just use the cookbook." It's sad but true. But it shine well on the book that has recipes for literally all the basic stuff you will need on a daily basis with multiple version of each solution so that you can pick the one that works best for you.

This book has some good tips and techniques, but sometimes very
hard to find. Best if you use it with another perl book say, "Programming Perl".

Okay, why do you want a Perl Cookbook? To get some canned code to either use or to analyze and learn from- right? So why wouldn't you want it in a electronic format along with five other Perl References, a search tool, and a generous price? Think about it. Go search for it on Amazon- "The Perl CD Bookshelf".

Some people consider me to be some kind of wizard with perl. But whenever I see something from Tom, I start to doubt it.

This book comes as no surprise to me as it is an example of what I have come to expect from Tom, although I am sure that Nat also put a lot into this book.

The book is full of useful information. Each chapter contains several problems all centered around a single topic. Each problem is first discussed, and the a solution is shown

Perl is a very different language to most and at times requires programmer to think differently to become a good perl programmer. Because if the structure of this book, with discussions and solutions, it shows those areas where you need to think differently. This is something that is not really shown in any other perl book I have read.

This book contains over 700 pages, which some may say is too many, but I would disagree. Every page in this book is worth reading and due to the size of the book, the topics covered are just about everthing you would want to do with perl, and probably more.

Every book has problems in its first printing and this book is no exception. But an errata is avaliable and I am sure the 2nd printing will have many things fixed.

Imperfections aside the content of this book is excellent and will be of invaluable use to newcommers and seaoned veterans.

This book is a must for any serious perl programmer.

I have been using Perl for many years and consider myself an advanced user. I own well over a dozen Perl books (8 published by O'Reilly), and this is the one that continually gets cracked open (it has tape on the spine -- always a good sign). The book is a little more accessible than the Programming Perl book, and it covers tons of various solutions. It's a valuable addition to the toolbox.

OREILLY does it again with another book in their Perl line!!

This is a fantastic companion reference to have on the book of any developer's desk, absolutely fantastic. I am continually impressed by the Perl series of books more than any other (I gave glowing reviews to 'Learning Perl') and 'Perl Cookbook' is no different.

When I open a book with the title 'Cookbook' I expect a whole myriad of recipes and while this is the case some of the time, it's not always true. For the retail price of $49.95 you are getting an absolute BARGAIN with the amount of material that is enclosed in this book (over 900+ pages). It is quite possible with the amount of examples and blurbs in this book that you might never need another programming reference for Perl.

The Chapter List is so impressive it's worth listing:

01. Strings
02. Numbers
03. Dates & Times
04. Arrays
05. Hashes
06. Pattern Matching
07. File Access
08. File Contents
09. Directories
10. Subroutines
11. Reference and Records
12. Packages, Libraries, and Modules
13. Classes, Objects, and Ties
14. Database Access
15. Interactivity
16. Process Management and Communication
17. Sockets
18. Internet Services
19. CGI Programming
20. Web Automation
21. mod_perl
22. XML

I don't usually list out chapters like I have done here because I don't know what purpose it really serves, but in this case I have done so to hopefully point out the amount of material that is in this book. Co-Authored by the same person that wrote the incredible "Learning Perl" Tom Christiansen, the only question is if you write Perl at all in your daily life.

If the answer is YES and you don't already own 'Perl Cookbook' what are you waiting for?!?!

Is it that good??

Yes folks, it really is.

***** HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION

I consider myself a beginner Perl-hacker. I use Perl to accomplish directly applicable tasks for my work (Logic Designer). I hack as little as needed to get the job done.

Having said that, when I have a new problem to solve, this is the first book I peruse for ideas... and more often than not I find something very useful and applicable.

Already having considerable experience as a professional programmer mostly from system level software, I started out my new job as a database programmer with little to no previous hands-on Perl experience at a company unit where Perl was the commonly used tool for various data collecting and manipulation tasks, which compelled me to learn Perl very rapidly. After digesting the Perl syntax from "Programming Perl", I picked up this book and was instantly able to code a reporting utility by referencing this book whenever I encountered a problem I didn't know the Perl solution for, such as smart ways for processing user input or even rounding floating point numbers.

Eventually I've read this book a few times from cover to cover and learned various common practices that I repeatedly, and successfully, apply in my day-to-day programming tasks, and some of the stuff in this book is even applicable to various other environments.

A recommended read for people who prefer to learn Perl by doing, and you just might add some tricks up your sleeve even if Perl isn't your primary interest.

Don't spend money on this book. Unless you are a beginner with no experience you will not learn anything new from it. Programming Perl is a much better book that contains all of the information found in this book plus x10 more.

Having used Perl for about 3 years now, I was overly comfortable with the language and originally bought the book because many a colleagues had recommended this resource to even seasoned perl programmers .The approach of this book is far different from most of those lofty, heady books with their shopping carts and examples of basically useless coding ideas. Tom takes real life needs and cooks them up with short, useable snippets of code. Having read this book from front to back i have found the resource ideal as a daily reference for problem solving]." Another nice thing was that I started finding functions that I didn't even know existed and then started imagining uses for them to solve problems I hadn't thought of as problems!

Great one. Keep these good books coming

Coming from C++ to Perl, I consider this book as quite excellent.

It has a bit of same 'feeling' than Meyers's 'Efective C++' (At least the 1992 edition) but the overall structure is more concrete.

After mastering the 'Lama' and 'Camel' I have a feeling that this is actually the book that gets the things together. If you learn from examples of code, like I do, this book is for you.

However, a caution. THIS IS NOT THE FIRST BOOK YOU SHOULD READ ABOUT PERL. No way. For that, read the 'Lama' and then 'Camel'. But after mastering the basics in those books, on the level that you do not need to peek for books to implement common tasks, then go for this.

Also, I consider this book much more practical than Orwant's, Hietaniemi's etc. 'Mastering Algorithms in Perl'. However, to be honest, after the faculty of computer science of Helsinki University (YES. The home of Linux, among other things) removed the cumlaude course for Perl I just might have a little grudge against the faculty (Not against Hietaniemi, however, the keeper of CPAN and the designated lecturer of Helsinki's Perl course).

Presents short code blocks for practical problems. If you've been frustrated by the seemingly irrelvant examples that plague a large number of Perl books (particularly applicable to those of us who work primarily with Win32 systems, by choice or not...), then this book should be a refreshing change. Usually my first stop when presented with an unfamiliar area of Perl.

If one knows basic perl, then this book, written by two of the topmost guys in the perl community, adds innumerable practical examples and discussions about them, for solving real world perl programming problems in a professional way. It may show one things perl can do, but which do not occure to everyone who has just learned the syntax and knows programming from less capable languages. It deals with topics from strings through IPC and Web. This book made perl working for several people I know.

I started skimming the book to find out more about certain subjects and ended up reading it from end to end. Well written and brimming with real-world code, this is THE book to read - after Programming Perl of course.

This book is not a good way to learn Perl, but if you're already up and running it will answer any weird question you can possibly com up with e.g. "How do you build an array of links from a page on the web" Answer: use LWP and HTML::LinkExtor.

The Q&A format is fabulous and Christiansen provides all kinds of expert insight.

Once you've learnt the syntax of a language, you want to learn the idioms, and how it's used most effectively. And given Perl's famous 'There's More The One Way To Do It' motto, you'll need all the help you can get. Perl Cookbook is that help.

Neither a reference nor a tutorial, if you've ever read another cookbook, you'll know what to expect -- after all, this is the daddy of them all. Themed chapters, consisting of short tasks that most people will find handy e.g. trimming white space from a string, or populating a hash. What makes Perl Cookbook so valuable is not just finding out how to do it, but finding out what the most efficient and idiomatic way to do it is. This is where you'll see the Perl way of doing things in action, and it's an immensely valuable learning experience, even if you never need to do exactly any of the things in the book.

For me, the most vital material is the earliest stuff, which takes you through how to use the string, array and hash, the guts of any Perl program. The final half of the book explores Perl's libraries for the use of databases, and a lot of network and web-related stuff, from simple socket programming, to CGI, and the use of mod_perl.

This is a cornucopia of Perl lore, firmly established in the Perl Canon, and deservedly so. You want it on your bookshelf if you want to really call yourself a Perl programmer.

As a programming cookbook, this book presents a bunch of problems that you, as a Perl programmer, may encounter in your everyday development work and then shows you both the code that solves the problem and a lengthy discussion on how the code works. So far none of the problems has applied to my everyday Perl development chores, but by simly reading through some of the more interesting problems, I've learned a great deal more about Perl than before.

So this book works well as a learning tool for someone who already knows Perl but is still intrigued by its vast arsenal of powerful features -- and arcane usage. Any serious Perl programmer can be helped by this book, whether he or she finds the examples in the book directly applicable or not.

I've got both the 1st and 2nd edition of this book. While my perl skills are strong, I'm not a guru my any stretch of the imagination. I've found this book useful on many occasions. Every time I've wanted to do something but wasn't sure of a good approach, I could always find examples in this book. The problem and solution approach is great. For the beginner it will help them get started right away, even if they don't quite understand what they are typing. For the intermediate user, it provides a good base of quick examples. For the advanced user, you probably wont need it, but is a handy item to hand to the guy who is always asking you perl questions.

Perl is a beautiful language and I speak many languages. Perl cookbook is an excellent way to start leaning the language in a sprint. Reading this book alone will not make you a guru, but if you have a short time to solve a problem, try perl cookbook.

Having this book on my shelf have proven very usefull on several occassions in the past and I can see it coming handy in the future.

The book though has its limitations , i find the web automation recipees a nuisance and often have to look elsewhere for guidance on that, but as a whole its a volume worth having

Hands down the best Perl book available. Excellent examples, excellent descriptions and overall a well thought out book. Anyone planning to write Perl should own this book.

It was amazing to find the things I could do in Perl after reading this book. Very nicely presented and lots of examples with actual lines of code in this book. A definite must-have for any serious Perl programmer.

This is a must-have for the aspiring Perl programmer. I already owned Learning Perl and Programming Perl, and this book provided a very welcome addition to them. The 'recipes' are exquisitely explained, and the book answers many (and I do mean many) of the questions you may ever have (for example, how to get a random line from a file without loading the file first). Like the other O'reilly books, this work is written in a humorous way, and laid out simple and effective. If you're planning to do _anything_ in Perl, this book will be a great time-saver.

Although not a typical perl language reference manual, this book goes further and shows you how to solve many solutions to common tasks. It will not teach you the language but it will take you a step above almost any level. I've been using it for over a year and it's still the most common perl reference guide I use. The problems it describes are ones I face extremelly often and instead of trying to figure them out myself I can simply look them up in this book and it will explain them thoroughly with lots of sample code.

My only complaints are that it has some errors in the sample code which require some modifying and it relies too much on modules. Personally I like knowing the bare code instead of relying too much on modules but it's a minor note.

I own the entire suite of O'Reilly Perl books, each of which had their ups and downs. If you're a Perl newbie or even a novice, this book can really help spark ideas. It helped me get started on two of my first major projects. Which really gave me some practical experience and got my retention and comfort level way up.

Personally, I especially enjoyed the area covering sockets. This book combined with Learning Perl can easily prepare you for developing simple client/server applications.

I like this book.

Tom and Nat's Perl Cookbook is without a doubt the most useful Perl book in my library. It provides examples and explainations on a wide range of topics from simple tasks such as template interpolation to database connectivity and user interfaces.

PCB does a wonderful job of introducing a number of concepts in applications that are useful in day to day programming while keeping the learning curve well under control. It is useful to all Perl programmers, beginning and advanced.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to broaden their knowledge of the Perl programming language without dedicating themselves to a topic for days on end.

There are so many errors in the book (about 350 errors). It was said that the book was hurried to meet the deadline (for Perl Conference). I suggest to wait until they fix them in the second edition.

Your first book on PERL should be "Learning PERL", now in its second edition. It takes you through the basics of PERL in a crystal clear fashion with lots of explanations, exercises, and examples. This should be your second book after you've learned to speak basic PERL. When you want to know the most efficient way to approach specific problems, no other book beats it. A concurrent purchase should be Programming PERL. That book is the definitive book on the language, but you could no more learn to program in PERL from that book than you could learn to speak English by using a dictionary as your textbook.

Spread over five chapters, the first portion of this book addresses Perl's basic data types. Chapter 1 covers matters like accessing substrings, expanding function calls in strings, and parsing comma-separated data. It also covers Unicode strings. Chapter 2 tackles oddities of floating-point representation, placing commas in numbers, and pseudo-random numbers. Chapter 3 demonstrates conversions between numeric and string date formats and using timers. Chapter 4 covers everything relating to list and array manipulation, including finding unique elements in a list, efficiently sorting lists, and randomizing them. Chapter 5 concludes the section on basics with a demonstration of the most useful data type, the associative array. The chapter shows how to access a hash in insertion order, how to sort a hash by value, how to have multiple values per key, and how to have an immutable hash.

Chapter 6, includes recipes for converting a shell wildcard into a pattern, matching letters or words, matching multiple lines, avoiding greediness, matching nested or recursive patterns, and matching strings that are close to but not exactly what you're looking for. Although this chapter is one of the longest in the book, it could easily have been longer still since every chapter contains uses of regular expressions. It's part of what makes Perl the language that it is.

The next three chapters cover the filesystem. Chapter 7 shows recipes pertaining to opening files, locking them for concurrent access, modifying them in place, and storing filehandles in variables. Chapter 8 discusses storing filehandles in variables, managing temporary files, watching the end of a growing file, reading a particular line from a file, handling alternative character encodings like Unicode and Microsoft character sets, and random access binary I/O. Finally, in Chapter 9 there are techniques to copy, move, or delete a file, manipulate a file's timestamps, and recursively process all files in a directory.

Chapter 10 through Chapter 13 focus on making your program flexible and powerful. Chapter 10 includes recipes on creating persistent local variables, passing parameters by reference, calling functions indirectly, crafting a switch statement, and handling exceptions. Chapter 11 is about data structures. Here basic manipulation of references to data and functions are demonstrated. Later recipes show how to create elaborate data structures and how to save and restore these structures from permanent storage. Chapter 12, concerns breaking up your program into separate files. The chapter discusses how to make variables and functions private to a module, customize warnings for modules, replace built-ins, trap errors loading missing modules, and use the h2ph and h2xs tools to interact with C and C++ code. Lastly, Chapter 13, covers the fundamentals of building your own object-based module to create user-defined types, complete with constructors, destructors, and inheritance. Other recipes show examples of circular data structures, operator overloading, and tied data types.

The next two chapters are about interfaces: one to databases and the other to users. Chapter 14 includes techniques for manipulating DBM files and querying and updating databases with SQL and the DBI module. Chapter 15 covers topics such as clearing the screen, processing command-line switches, single-character input, moving the cursor using termcap and curses, thumbnailing images, and graphing data.

The last portion of the book is devoted to interacting with other programs and services. Chapter 16 is about running other programs and collecting their output, handling zombie processes, named pipes, signal management, and sharing variables between running programs. Chapter 17 shows how to establish stream connections or use datagrams to create low-level networking applications for client-server programming. Chapter 18 is about higher-level protocols such as mail, FTP, Usenet news, XML-RPC, and SOAP. Chapter 19, contains recipes for processing web forms, trapping their errors, avoiding shell escapes for security, managing cookies, shopping cart techniques, and saving forms to files or pipes. Chapter 20, covers non-interactive uses of the Web, such as fetching web pages, automating form submissions in a script, extracting URLs from a web page, removing HTML tags, finding fresh or stale links, and parsing HTML. Chapter 21 introduces mod_perl, the Perl interpreter embedded in Apache. It covers fetching form parameters, issuing redirections, customizing Apache's logging, handling authentication, and advanced templating with Mason and the Template Toolkit. Finally, Chapter 22 is about ubiquitous data format XML and includes recipes such as validating XML, parsing XML into events and trees, and transforming XML into other formats.

Index is very good. This book sometimes just provides small sections of code instead of complete examples. You might also want to consider "PERL: Essential Programs for Your Survival at Work" by Larry L. Smith.

The book, excelent.. but I had problems with the delivery. Fortunally I bougth it to Amazon and they sended to me another book. When I have used UPS or FEDEX I have not had any problem, but with the normal mail, please I don't want it anymore..

The Perl Cookbook is very comprehensive, compared to other Perl books that we've come across. We would agree with the back of the book in saying that it is one of the best programming textbooks we have ever read. The book's receipt is very timely, for us, since we were having an issue with storing data structures to disk at the time we read the book. The Perl "Recipe" in the book helped us greatly in our application development. We especially like the regular expression grab bag in the middle, we use it all the time. Our students have been very eager to soak up the Perl help that the book provided.

This guide provides lots of ready-to-use solutions for all sorts of tasks - a great compliment to the "Learning Perl" and "Programming Perl" titles, also from O'Reilly.

Perl is a flexible but often cryptic programming language, with so many uses that regular computer/UNIX users would do well to learn to use it. Over the last six years, I have probably written 200 different perl scripts to suit a myriad of purposes. I have found this book to be the best resource of examples and starting points, far superior to other perl and scripting books. The success of the O'Reilly "cookbook" concept appears to have resulted in similar books about Java, C++ and Linux administration. I have not even looked at about half of this resource and probably never will, but it has been a truly worthwhile investment.

This book is not about teaching you the theories or nuances of each command. Rather, it provides EXAMPLES on how to write certain section of code that prove invaluable. When you want to write a routine to do a little something, but not sure how to go about it most efficiently/elegantly, or just plain clueless (often my case), this book is a godsend. Also contains many uses for handy modules that most of us never even knew existed. I suggest getting the newer 2nd ed. and complement it with O'Reilly's excellent Programming Perl book.

A must have for any Perl programmer. Code snippets for nearly any conceivable scenario. This book can save you time.

This book is useful in a 1000 ways.

I go back to it at least 3 times a week.

If you code in PERL, get this book.

I used it for most of my Perl programming requirements.
Superbly written, great content, great examples,very helpful!

This is not the book you need to read page by page. For my own experience, whenever I find the Perl tasks I need to work out, I would look up this book as the reference. Very comprehensive book provide almost every Perl application in different aspects. Becasue this is not a stand-alone book, you need to buy another Perl book for cross reference. Worth buying.

I get busy at work. Sometimes months pass before I get a chance to do someting fun in Perl. That's where this book comes in. Gets you back up to speed in a couple minutes. It saved me alot of time.

Your boss will be impressed. He won't care if you came up with all the algorithms or got them from this book. He will care that you got it done fast.

This is a must-have book for intermittent perl hackers. It's on my shelf with some other excellent O'Reilly books.

i keep this book close to my keyboard. i'm still learning perl, and everytime i've hit something that i don't know how to do yet i've found an answer in here. the table of contents is really detailed, so you can just find the area you're looking for, skim down, find the exact problem, and flip to the page. you'll have your answer in seconds. pair this with programming perl (which i still use mostly for the great listing of all the built in functions).

A recent web programming class I took focused primarily on Perl. The vast majority of the homework problems were addressed by this book in one form or another. I learned how to handle CGI scripts easily (without having to write cranky, half-correct parsing code myself), set up dbms for easy data storage, and even subclass existing Perl classes. My life would have been considerably less pleasant had I not had the Perl Cookbook.

...you want this book!

It has the solutions to just about every problem you'll encounter (almost anyway ;)

The approch with first a problem, followed by a solution and a discussion (often with references to real world modules and stuff) is ... GREAT!

If you thought that yuo needed Programming Perl (and if you are reading this, you do) you want this one as weel, my best buy!

This book contains good examples and code which is very useful to solve your common problems. The way it organized (problem, solution then discussion)is simply superb.

This is the most useful book that I ever had. If you are like me, who is new to Perl and want to use Perl "right away" to solve some problems, then this book is for you. Also, this book also shows how easy and convenient to program Perl for the impatient.

Mr. Hall (author of Effective Perl Programming) said that this book's subject is broad (not deep), and I add: this book shows solutions to many problems that most will encouter at some time.

this is a great cookbook that harness the power of Perl, and is also FUN to read.

This book includes mostly sample code and examples which is the best thing it could include. It gave me the answers I needed quickly with viable solutions. It is worth every penny, unlike most books I purchase.

For anyone who knows Perl, but wants to know how to do something particular, or, better yet, how to do it well, this is the book to have. And with the code examples available on-line, you don't even have to retype. As stated in the book's preface, it isn't for beginners. The book is very well organized if you know Perl. With Tom as close to the Perl core as one can get, you would do well to trust this excellent reference above others.

A must for any web programmer. I wish there was a version of this book for other langauages. THIS IS THE WAY COMPUTER BOOKS NEED TO BE LAYED OUT! Beautiful, brilliant, to-the-point, and no BS, just code and solutions.

If you don't already know Perl, get another book to learn it, but then buy this after you do! If you're a programmer like me, with a "I don't want to hear a speech, just shut up and tell me how to do it" additude, then this book is for you. Hats off to the authors and publisher. Awesome.

I have been to seminars where Tom has spoke and enjoyed his presentations very much. I found the literature he gave out on last years LISA conference was which was only ~180 pages was more informative. I thought the book jumped around too much and did not give complete enough examples/explanations.

If you are a programmer who designs code by peeking at other's code,then this book is a must buy.

It is loaded with great examples and will save you tremendous amounts of time. No more re-inventing the wheel.

This book shows you how to do almost anything with Perl.

From regular expressions and text handling to sophisticated security and web utilities, this is the book.

If you benefit from example code then this is heaven on earth.

A great job Christiansen and Torkington and many thanks to O'Reilly for publishing this book.

If you are beginner to expert, this helps with simple methods that are tried and true. I find it most helpful in giving me ideas of how to address problems far beyond the scope of the book. Sometimes just simple reminders of cookbook methods stimulates thoughts in orthogonal directions that yield the best solutions to customer problems.

Most O'Reilly Perl titles imply you'll learn something useful. Only Learning Perl and the Perl Cookbook fully come through in that regard.

The Perl Cookbook features some very practical solutions to some very practical problems (in Perl).

I find myself coming back to this one again and again - more so than Learning Perl, Programming Perl, Programming the Perl DBI, or Perl Best Practices. This is The One. The book to use to learn the Right Way to perform quite a large number of useful functions or tasks in Perl.

yummy perl recipes; easy to prepare! very helpful for working with date and time data.

Very useful, well worth it. Getting a book like this and having it save you the time of working out how the (yes, come on, admit it, a lot of perl syntax etc. is quite arcane) actual program should be set out, formatted or whatever, is fantastic. Several times this book has done that for me, so one of the best computer book purchases I have ever made.

for a beginner like me this book was a second read after I finished the llama book.. bit bulky but worth the money

Mine is the strength of 10 - for I know perl.

This book is enjoyable to read - warm and chatty. This book has recipes you can clip and modify. This book is my favorite perl book.

Hey, y'all - I am usually agnostic when it comes to languages and platforms and such - after all, what good does it do to denigrate somebody's favorite programming language?

But I am a lover of perl and turn to it first, if possible.

A reasonable mastery of perl will increase your sysadm, programming, and scripting powers manyfold. Launch a process and monitor it! Grind thru humugously huge log files! In the words of the immortal Steve Wittie "I'll never write shell script again!"

Larry Wall - the great Larry Wall, Tom Christianson and the rest have the grace and good humor of Donald Knuth and Dennis Ritchie in the days of old.

And perl is so 'cool' so flexible, so fun.

This book has many techniques that help you solve your date to date problem using Perl. if you are familiar with Perl's syntax, you should have no problem picking up this book. The solution for each problem also has great detail on How and Why to solve a problem this way, plus the related Perldoc.

oh, even though this book published 3 years ago, all knowledge applied ( since we are still facing the same kind of problem ;)

PERL Cookbook 2nd Edition O'reilly
By: Tom Christiansen & Nathan Torkington

Well I have the complete PERL library. From the PERL Black book to the PERL bookshelf and all between. When I first ordered the PERL Cookbook I was looking for a god resource for quick scripts to help me in My OpenMosix development. I received the book at our April Meeting and was immediately surprised by it's heft at 927 pages it is well packed with technical information on a wide range of subjects and code snippets to get you on you way.
I was let down by the complex nature of the language...While well done for a PERL or Programming Guru it was not easy comprehend able by the average user that I felt would be looking to purchase this book. The code snippets are a God send thou and more than make up for the overly technical writing.
I personally used the network and file scripts and was able to put them to work immediately. I would not recommend this book to Novices, But all others would surely gain a valuable edge by having this in there library.
Brett hoff
Pensacola Linux User Group.
bhoff@pcolalug.org

After reading Learning Perl and Perl Programming, if you read this, you'll be 95% set in regards to everything you will need to know to be a genuine professional Perl programmer. Those three books, from beginner to advanced, will leave you wanting only a little more in your thirst for Perl knowledge. You'll be in a position to learn the rest through experience and online recources--this saving a lot of money (unless you like to connect every single O'Reilly book anyway, like me).

This has to be the most used book on my bookshelf. Even more than programming perl. This book is not for those who are just starting, but is an excellent reference for daily users.

I have seen lots Perl books and documentations, but this one very helpful when you really coding Perl. It has practical problems solved and discussed.

It only lacks detailed matter on CGI-Perl.

The idea of the Perl Cookbook was to give programmers of all levels ideas and techniques to improve their programming skills. This is a rather grand undertaking, yet I must say that this book really does the job well.

Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of Perl (such as arrays, hashes, or CGI) and presents "recipes" of various levels of complexity to do various tasks. What is most impressive is that these recipes are geared toward real-life problems that Perl Programmers face. I can testify to the usefulness of this book because I find myself referring to it again and again when I need to do something in Perl I am not already familiar with.

I truly believe that every serious Perl programmer must have this book whether for work or for home use. It is truly indispensible for nearly every kind of Perl programming issue you might encounter.

This is actually one of the best perl book I ever acquired.
We are a group of professionals working on the field, and this book is regularly missing from the shelf.
It is very quick and easy to find simple solutions to common problems.

Coming from C++ to Perl, I consider this book as quite excellent.

It has a bit of same 'feeling' than Meyers's 'Efective C++' (At least the 1992 edition) but the overall structure is more concrete.

After mastering the 'Lama' and 'Camel' I have a feeling that this is actually the book that gets the things together. If you learn from examples of code, like I do, this book is for you.

However, a caution. THIS IS NOT THE FIRST BOOK YOU SHOULD READ ABOUT PERL. No way. For that, read the 'Lama' and then 'Camel'. But after mastering the basics in those books, on the level that you do not need to peek for books to implement common tasks, then go for this.

Also, I consider this book much more practical than Orwant's, Hietaniemi's etc. 'Mastering Algorithms in Perl'. However, to be honest, after the faculty of computer science of Helsinki University (YES. The home of Linux, among other things) removed the cumlaude course for Perl I just might have a little grudge against the faculty (Not against Hietaniemi, however, the keeper of CPAN and the designated lecturer of Helsinki's Perl course).

The most usefull book when i write perl program,it's a solution for perl programming,both good toturial and reference

I missed the examples 'chapter' when the 2nd edition of Programming Perl was released, and this certainly is an expanded and worthwhile. The book is not precisely a reference, but it acts as a reference, when you have a problem and dont know how to solve it in Perl, the cookbook is always a sure bet.

One thing, be wary of syntax: there are multiple places in which syntax is incorrect in the book, perhaps because of typos (better testing and editing of the code presented would be suggested in any new printings).

All said The Cookbook is a wonderful edition to the Camel book.

This book is a great perl resource. Whenever I need to figure out how to do something new in Perl, this is usally where I turn.

The "Perl Cookbook" condenses into code algorithms that are both beautiful and helpful. Paired with the "Programming Perl" book, which despite problems of organization is undoubtedly the best Perl reference, the cookbook is simply indispensible for both the serious Perl programmer and anyone who wishes to learn how to write Perl naturally.

Every language has a natural idiom; even COBOL. Perl, having convenience so strongly in its genesis, is not very similar to its predecessors in many ways, and along with solutions to individual problems what one learns from the cookbook is how a Perl programmer would write such a program. You learn twice reading these answers: not only how to solve your problem (how do you read a file line by line in reverse? how do you trap signals in your program?) but also what the natural idioms are which both simplify your code and make clearer to you how Perl works.

I reviewed "Programming Perl" and had reservations about it: I have none about this book. It is not a reference to solve all your questions about the language--buy "Programming Perl" for that. It is not a tutorial--for that, get "Learning Perl". What it is is a distillation of some smart people's work in Perl; well-explained, clearly laid out, and highly informative in every area a programmer is likely to work in. Buy it if you love Perl.

If you are considering using perl for anything above "hello world" programs, this book will save you countless hours. Containing concise and well described explanations on how to use perl in hundreds of common and uncommon tasks, this book makes even complex taks simple.

Very useful book of its kind. It provide many small useful examples to learn perl. The authors know the subject and real world problems and they write this book to provide elegant solutions to many riddles.

This should not be first Perl book for novice. For those who know shell, regular expression, C/C++ and Unix command, you can use this book as quick jumpstart to learn Perl.

All Perl books from O'Reilly are exellent, but this one is a standout.

If you are an experinced programmer, you are going to love this one. The problems are common and solutions elegant and authorative, and written in very concise hit the point fashion.

If you use perl at all, buy this book. It will save you hours of head-scratching. This will not teach you how to use perl - just how to use it well.

This is perfect addition for either knowledge or more fundamental perl programming book ("Programming Perl" or "Advanced perl programming" by O'Reilly, for example). Absolutely irreplaceble on each and every perl, perl/cgi, perl/database programmer's or UNIX system administrrator's bookshelf... Buy it and see for yourself. Thanks, Tom ;-)

The book explores perl is all possible ways. While doing so, the author jumped around, all over the book. For a beginner, I won't recommend this book, but very good one if you have some experience

After many years of searching, I finally found the perfect instructional guide to making artificial pearls. This book is a great "how to" on everything from raising oysters to harvesting the pearls themselves. In no time I had high quality pearl specimens ready for sale. Black pearls, white pearls, big pearls, small pearls. It was easy to do and fun!

If you do not want to learn Perl in depth, but just solve every-day problems in a fast, easy and effective way, this is the book for you. The code samples are normally short and always give the answer, you looked for (or at least, a very useful hint). Very interesting are also the introductions to the main chapters.

Have this book near you whenever you are programming Perl. It's an excellent "How To" for intermediate to advanced Perl programmers. Well organized, concise, clear. Very few technical errors. My one complaint would be that many of the examples use Perl modules when they don't really have to- I would prefer knowing how to do many things the hard way (but also know the easy way).

This is a very nice book and recommend to every hands-on developer writing standard and high quality perl scripts. It is very well organised and easy to refer for specific topics as well. Most of the topics come with sample code.

If you are like me and have read FAQs, READMEs and the like this book definately gets you over the hump on learning Perl. Learning Perl and Programming Perl were very good books to follow, but this book gets you on your way quickly. This is a very good reference for the many facets of Perl that can't be found through ordinary channels. It is a MUST read for beginner and intermediate Perl programmers.

Yep, definitely the best Perl book; maybe even the best O'Reilly book. I made quantum leaps in my grasp of Perl after buying this one. You might suspect it would just give you code to use for specific tasks, but the discussions included with each recipe really flesh it out - so you actually learn concepts from the book. Start out with "Learning Perl" though - this is not really a book for a complete novice.

This is an excellent book! I came into a new job and needed to learn PERL asap. Knowing other programming languages I didn't think it would be too bad. I bought this book and I found all the answers I needed! They have solutions to almost all the problems or questions you will encounter! A MUST have for all PERL programmers.

This is by far the best Perl book you can buy today. This should be a companion to Programming Perl, which is basically a manual and 90% of it is free, and verbatim at perl.com. This book contains what Programming Perl has left out, practical examples (like the previous edition of the book). A lot of the problems/solutions are in the Perl FAQ, but the book goes into detail explainations, the whys, hows, and alternative solutions, etc. There are numerous bugs in the examples, but that's Ok as long as you get the gist of the matter. I wish it has more examples, or maybe a volume II.

While this book will not teach you the basics of programming perl, it is an excellent resource for those wanting to learn to how to do practical things with perl.

The book is very well written and is broken into nice bitesize sections that each deal with a specific programming topic. Each section is full of golden nuggets for the novice or intermediate programmer.

Highly recommended

Of the large stack of Perl books I've purchased this year, this one seems to get pulled down more than most of the others combined. Whenever I need to do something new in Perl, I always look at the Cookbook for hints, and always a gem of knowledge can be found there. I can now let the "Real Perl Programs" chapter of my worn copy of the old Camel book finally rest in peace. Kudos to Tom and Nathan for such a great resource!

The Perl Cookbook is great. It has lots of info. Even though I have been programming a long time I didn't understand everything right away. If u have read other books on perl before and u understand the basics of perl u should DEFINITELY buy this book.

Not only is this book great, but I wish it had come out sooner. If I'd had this in hand years ago, I'd have saved myself literally years of effort, both as far as just getting things done, but also in learning general Perl skills.

You can have any other Perl book on the market, but you're not getting the whole story until you get this one too. This, more than any other one Perl book, is something that can stay with you from the time you're just starting to learn Perl, to when you're an expert at it.

If you are a serious Perl programmer or if you are interested in becomming one, this book is a must-have addition to your library.

I use this book at least daily and often more frequently. It is an excellent reference work and a great tutorial on Perl.

If you want to write Perl programs BUY THIS BOOK!

Don't bother trying to figure how to do something with Perl. Tom has already figured it out and included it in this book. It is a treasure trove of useful scripts. Some are ready to be used as is. The Chapter on Internet Services covers some high level concepts, like fetching POP3 mail, writing a TCP proxy, being an FTP client and so on.

This book isn't really meant to be read from cover to cover. Just pick a subject that interests you and learn!

An excellent selection of perl solutions for a broad range of real-world problems. Puts much of the theory of other books into practice, using well constructed perl snippets. One of the things I like most is that in true tmtowtdi fashion, they often present alternative approaches to the solution.

In my opinion, the best Perl book from O'Reilly since the original "purple Camel." A must-have (or very nearly so) for anyone gaining proficiency in the language. I haven't studied it thoroughly enough to comment on the frequency of typos and other errors, but my overall impression is extremely favorable, and I'm pretty hard to please. :-) My only complaint is that it's another one of those books that is just too darn thick. But otherwise, good work indeed!

This book has more examples and HOWTO's than any of the other perl books. Not only will you learn Perl but it is also a great book on UNIX programming.

This book's an excellent companion to the Camel book, and I'd recommend it to *anyone* who program's in Perl. I've been programming in perl for over 5 years now, and have been waiting for something like this. The book contains hundreds of very useful, short programs, and excellent explanations. Buy it!

If this book has a flaw, it's that it's got too much information.

Well, maybe I should take that back. There's not too much information. I wish there were more. But as is the case with cookbooks, finding the right recipe is not a simple matter unless you are familiar with the book.

But that shouldn't be a significant problem with readers of Perl Cookbook, because all Perl programmers great and small will want to take the large tome and wade around in it, getting their feet wet in the various sections, seeing what it has to offer.

At first the sheer size of the book is intimidating: over 750 pages containing 20 chapters, each with 11 to 23 recipes. But each chapter is broken down into a logical topic, and the reader can get a feel for the book by choosing one topic of interest and digesting one recipe at a time.

This book is indeed for all types of programmers. Though beginners likely have the most to gain, its recipes are often useful for the experienced, and even expert, programmer who doesn't want to redo what has been done or rethink what has been thunk. I doubt there exists a Perl programmer who won't value it.

Perl Cookbook is the most useful Perl book ever written, and it is presented in a comfortable style, carefully explaining the recipes and pointing the readers to resources where they can find more information about the topic at hand. While a Perl programmer can get by without this book -- and in the nearly 11 years since perl was first released, many have done just that, thank you -- he shouldn't have to.