Just a little about these two books. I played a small role coordinating David's book and I edited the Regular Expressions Cookbook.
David's book had a strong life in its first edition as Perl for System Administrators, but because Perl titles are not selling as robustly over the past few years, we decided to stress the "Automating" part for the second edition. (Note that we've still updated our classic Perl books, though.) The Automating book is still Perl through and through, top to bottom. I bet no other book refers to so many CPAN packages! And it's intensely practical. The Regular Expressions Cookbook authors were extremely detail-oriented, almost fanatically so. They're excellent writers, and so careful that I was shocked to hear that someone found typos (as people do with every book). They like to be thorough. I'm sure they covered every nook and cranny of every topic. On the flip side, if they decide they don't think much of something, they totally leave it out. They decided that POSIX classes (such as [[:alpha:]]) were lame and outdated, so I believe they didn't even drop a hint in the book that they existed. In contrast, they spent a pretty good amount of time on UNICODE. Andy _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
