Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!cmic!garvey
From: garvey@cmic.UUCP (Joe Garvey)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: The Book (was Re: Looking for balanced critique of Perl)
Message-ID: <355@cmic.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jun 90 20:17:36 GMT
References: <4811@muffin.cme.nist.gov> <103428@convex.convex.com> <1990Jun27.171449.4507@iwarp.intel.com>
Organization: Califonia Microwave Inc., Sunnyvale, CA.
Lines: 36

In article <1990Jun27.171449.4507@iwarp.intel.com>, merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz) writes:
> I know that from our present work on the book, what you will probably
> see is 250 pages in the tone of the 67 page manpage, so count on about
> 4 times the number of examples, and a few larger programs documented,
> along with some "philosophy" and "religion" regarding programming in
> Perl effectively.  To get everything you ask for, and to document the
> features that Larry will most certainly add while the book is at the
> printer, you will probably have to get "The Book, version 2.0."
> Sorry...  it's the nature of the biz.
 
> Buy the book!  Yell at us for not having any examples of
> "Perl-assisted honeydanber UUCP management" or "how to eval an
> arbitrary expression inside a quoted string" or "when do I use $\"!
> But 250 pages is certainly better than 67 pages.  If you are a regular
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Not if it isn't well organized and thought out. Despite the terseness
of the man page (a time honored unix tradition :-)), it does a "complete"
job, and is well organized. No, there aren't scads of examples. No, it
doesn't start you off with just enough information to get you started
if you haven't used perl before... it dives right in. The book should
be targeted (in my opinion) to help those others who can't get started
in perl from the man page. I hope one of the objectives of the book is
to increase the numbers of perl users... to mainstream perl. I hope
that eventually Sun, HP, SCO, OSF will offer perl as part of their
standard unix.

Write an important program, give it away. Make money off the book, and
the movie. :-)

--

Joe Garvey                       UUCP: {apple,backbone}!versatc!mips!cmic!garvey
California Microwave             Internet: garvey%cmic@mips.com
990 Almanor Ave                  HP Desk: garvey (cmic@mips.com) / hp1900/ux
Sunnyvale, Ca, 94086