Practical mod_perl

Perl Best Practices

Perl Template Toolkit

Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules

Perl Books

Embedding Perl in HTML With Mason

Format: Paperback
Author: Dave Rolsky
ReleaseDate: October, 2002
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Rating:

Mason review (dave rolsky)

I am not un-intelligent yet after trying several hours i cannot grasp the concept of passing values from html forms, to my mason program. I suppose Dave thinks that this is a fairly advanced topic so he can speak in advanced ways (that unfortunately are of no help).
Parameters in http requests dont have dollar signs in them dave do they?

Put it simply dave would be my advice to you, this book is painful to read as its explained to me as though i was a computer.

Great Book but...
. But. it is a little too short. Not really but I would have loved to have more book. The book covers just about every topic. I personally would have enjoyed to have more examples in each area. They made sure that there is at least on example for each topic. They even give some information about other competing products and about products that use Mason as it's base (for example Bircolage - I think I spelled that correctly). I am really glad the book to come out, it is a perfect addition to my collection of O'Reilly and Perl books.

Thanks for a great book!.

Get me to the edge....
Then I saw the Mason book. I am using Mason for about a year. My first tought was: "Why should I buy a book about Mason - The online documentation is excellent. . . ?".

But even the introduction chapters of this book gives you new ideas how to get things done. Starting with the second half of chapter 4 every Masonsite developer should take a close look. He will find a in deep discussion about every Mason feature - and more (e. g. The Bricolage-CMS-Appendix).

I my opinion there is no discussion "to buy or not to buy" this book. The only question is "when".

On the one hand this book can be a bit boring for "new" Mason user and as mentioned before the online documentation is very good. On the other hand if you have your first mason-site done and read this book you will have very likely the urgent desire to rewrite some code.

But this is a common perl problem: "There are many ways to get things done. "

I dislike the "Example" chapter. One of the big advantages of Mason is the possibility to seperate perl-code and HTML. This ist not very well done within the example-site.

Conclusion: This book is not needed to get in touch with Mason althought usefull - but if you are really starting to deploy a site I strongly recommend this book.