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Computer Science and Perl Programming Jon Orwant (editor) Published by O'Reilly and Associates ISBN:0-596-00310-2 758 pages £ 28.50 Published: 15th November 2002 reviewed by James Youngman    in the March 2004 issue (pdf), (html)

This book is the first of three volumes which contain a collection of articles from The Perl Journal.

I wanted to review this book becuase I'm a fan of Perl, having started using Perl 4 to do things that just weren't possible in any other scripting language back then (for example fix the relational integrity errors in a proprietary database by finding and deleting orphaned records). The title was particlarly attractive because I think there isn't enough computer science in professional software development.

However, this review is very, very, very late. The reason is that I didn't get round to finishing the book. If you think that sounds bad, it is. I read a large number of books and this one wasn't interesting enough for me to get around to reading the last third or so.

The fundamental idea of the book is to collect together articles from TPJ which have something in common and present them in themed sections. This works reasonably well, but although the collection is fairly varied, the end result is mixed without being appealingly eclectic.

I'm glad that nobody tried to introduce me to Perl with a book like this. I would never have become an enthusiast. There are many good articles in the book, but I think it just doesn't work as a collection.

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