[.ca] Data Munging with Perl (ISBN 1930110006)

Valuable for its _clarity_:
After reading this book I rewrote a pretty massive postscript pasrsing and munging system that I was having a lot of trouble with and felt like I did it the _right_ way. If you follow the author through his examples and actually read the book (which I was able to read almost straight through) I think that you will find yourself with a more long-view approach. And I think that makes this book valuable. And admit it, every time you read throgh a regex chapter you get a little more in the old noggin...

Great Dip Into Data Munging and Perl:
This book, written by Perlmonk (www.perlmonks.org) David Cross, is an excellent, easy to read, and easy to follow guide into what Perl does best: Data Munging. For those who don't know, Munging Data means taking data from one format and putting it into another. Perl excels at this, and the author shows you the how and the why. The author gives you enough information, and background to start working with the more advanced Perl functions like map, grep, pack, unpack, etc. It is possible to write Perl without ever having to use these modules, but David Cross shows you how they are more effective, more powerful. This book will expand your Perl vocabulary by leaps and bounds. I know that some people would say that the book is too thin, and it is thinner than many computer books today, but the thickness of a book does not determine it's merit. Effective Perl Programming by Joseph Hall and Randal Schwartz is often cited as one of the best Perl books ever and it's thinner than this one. If you are a junior to intermediate level programmer, and you want to improve your Perl skills, pick up this book. You won't be disappointed.

Good for data-processing *beginners*:
It's a guide. David takes you through the different "data munging" tasks ( record oriented data ? binary data ? fixed-width data ? XML ? ) and shows you his proper ways of dealing with them ( or, at least, thinking about them ). It's not an encyclopedia of "data munging", the book is 300 pages and many of them ( too many, may be ) are detailed descriptions of useful CPAN modules ( which I wasn't reading as careful as the rest of the book, since POD was always enough ), so it covers only a usual data processing tasks letting you to go deeper by yourself for more advanced topics. After you'll finish it much less "data sources" will scare you - the solutions and references are inside. As I said, it may be good for data-processing beginners, but Perl experts will hardly find lot's of new information in it. P.S. I trust him and therefore follow his advices in every script I start to think of ( especially the one about "UNIX filter model" ).

Belongs on every sysadmin's desk:
This book isn't about arcane corners of Perl theory. It's about how to write Perl programs that perform the "simple" task of converting data from one format to another. Need to get every headline from an RSS feed? Or report the three users with the most processes running, as listed by `ps`? Or extract the first paragraph from each of a thousand HTML files? Or make a .tsv file based on all the "From:" and "Subject:" lines in your mailbox file? If those sorts of tasks sound familiar to you, then this is the book you've been looking for. It has working code for doing these sorts of things, involving lots of different common kinds of formats. By tech book standards, this book is short (300 pages), but it's clear and direct and to the point -- no bloat here. Every page tells you something you need to know, with useful examples for every idea that it explains.

7 years ago this would have been good.:
I was hoping this book would provide some valuable routines for processing data, but instead it has proved virtually useless in my day to day job as a UNIX data center adminstrator. I work with XML a great deal (as well as relational databases), but the author's coverage of XML is week (2 pages on the DOM)-- and no coverage of dealing with record sets. This is a good text if you have reams of old fashioned columnar data that you need to text process. Hmm, I did that 7 years ago.