Perl Books
Data Munging with Perl
Format: Paperback
Author: David Cross
ReleaseDate: 15 January, 2001
Publisher: Manning Publications
Rating:
Belongs on every sysadmin's desk 
It's about how to write Perl programs that perform the "simple" task of converting data from one format to another. This book isn't about arcane corners of Perl theory. 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.
Valuable for its _clarity_
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. 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. 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.
Good for data-processing *beginners* 
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 a guide. 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" ).
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