Martin "Kingpin" Thurn recently did me the favor of mentioning my book
recently:
Perl & LWP book
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596001789/thestarwarscol06
(subliminal message buy buy buy subliminal message buy)
So I think I'll pass along the favor by mentioning a new book that I
recommend to folks (like me, until quite recently) who just don't have the
hang of DBI and SQL. I mean, I just never sat down and learned it; and the
various references on those subjects seem either too elementary, or too
dry. But this book is just right, I think:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0764549561
/Perl Database Programming/ by Brent Michalski
ISBN: 0764549561
It's by one of the authors of /Writing CGI Applications with Perl/ (Kevin
Meltzer and Brent Michalski), which also does a little bit of database stuff.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201710145
And while I'm on the topic, another great book about CGI stuff is Clinton
Pierce's book /Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours/. It sounds like an intro
book, and it is; but as a bonus, the last third of the book, or so, is
basically about CGI design, and it's very well designed. I asked the
author about that section, and he said it was basically condensed from his
notes that are the basis of his lecture to new programmers at his company,
a lecture he referred to as something like "The How Not To Make Big CGI
Security Holes On My Servers lecture". So it's very well thought out, and
time-tested.
And the book isn't very expensive -- something I always appreciate.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0672322765
ISBN: 0672322765
Even though I've been coding CGIs since basically 1994, and even though I
thought I knew everything, those two CGI books pointed out security
problems with some approaches that I had been using. Needless to say,
learning to avoid those sorts of problems is worth the expense of the books!
And even though I thought "I've gotten along for eight years without using
a proper database system, so why should I start now?", once I read the
/Perl Database Programming/, I was able to turn right around and take a
horribly complex module of mine, which was full of lock files, half a dozen
tab-separated files and their indexes (which didn't even really work well),
and I turned it into a much simpler and readable DBI/SQL-based system
(which does work!).
--
Sean M. Burke http://search.cpan.org/author/sburke/
