Perl Guru Has Another Home Run
Everything you wanted to know about Perl and socket applications. Lincoln is very good about explaining all concepts and providing lots of examples.Lincoln is the author of the CGI.pm module. In addition, he wrote a book about CGI.pm that is the bible - a "must have" for anyone doing Perl CGI work.
Lincoln is a great guy. He wrote a Perl module for Napster. I could not get it running on my Win32 system (my linux box was at work). Within an hour of sending him an email, he sent me a new module for Win32 that worked great. Lincoln did not even know who I was.
Perfectly organized and clearly explained
First off, this book assumes an intermediate knowledge of perl. With that out of the way, this is the best programming book that I own. It is perfectly organized and the explanation/documentation are crystal clear- written line by line. Each chapter starts off with a very basic program and goes to an advanced program at the end of every chapter. If you are a UNIX sys admin or an aspiring one BUY THIS BOOK!
754 Pages Packed with Pefection
As an intermediate Perl programmer and a relative newcomer to network programming, I found Part 1, The Basics, to be pure gold. Dr. Stein's easy-to-follow writing style helped me to finally understand elusive concepts like fork, pipes and sockets.As the book progresses, it gently builds into more and more advanced network topics. When I hit Part 4, Advanced Topics, I knew was in over my head. Yet, I now have a great reference for the future when I need/want to learn how to play with Broadcasting, UDP servers, etc.
One of the most valuable aspects of this book is his coverage of such a multitude of Perl modules, helping the reader to understand the each of modules' basic API in a straightforward manner.
This book is worth every cent.
Explanation of an often cryptic topic is very succesful
The first thing I want to point out for many readers who may not know this: Lincoln Stein is the author of CGI.pm -- the module that is resonsible for a vast majority of perl powered websites on the internet. Second, Lincoln has contributed enormous amounts of code to the perl community, and I originally bought this book as an insight to the code of his that I have and want to work with further.Let me say that a lot of the book focuses on modules like Net::Telnet and Net::FTP. That isnt particularly useful to me because I have a firm understanding of them already.
The real meat of the book, if you ask me, is the discussion of fully multiplexed servers that are able to handle many simultaneous upstreams and downstreams, and do a vast array of things.
His code is very clear and concise, as well as commented and explained throughout the text. This is definitely something every perl programmer who writes network maintenance code should have.
Plug in, turn on, use Perl;
Lincoln Stein's latest book, "Network Programming with Perl", is a must-have text for anyone who is doing Perl network programming, or may be doing so in the near future. It reviews the basics of Perl I/O, explains the details of Perl's network functions, and covers the ever-evolving examples with line-by-line descriptions. From telnet, mail, ftp, and the Web, from Usenet News to custom services, this 650-page book covers any networking task currently known to man, and gives you the skills to manage the unknown tasks to come.
