Perl Best Practices

Higher-Order Perl: Transforming Programs with Programs

Perl Testing : A Developer's Notebook

Wicked Cool Perl Scripts : Useful Perl Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems

Intermediate Perl

Perl Books

Pro Perl Parsing (Pro)

Format: Hardcover
Author: Christopher M. Frenz
ReleaseDate: 10 August, 2005
Publisher: Apress
Rating:

Experts guide to extracting the data you want!
Frenz has put together a real how to manual for those who use Perl for parsing. Christopher M.
Grabbing the data you want from a file can be tricky but Frenz has taken parsing from the top shelf
and placed it where any Perl programmer can use it.

The opening chapter is great for anyone who has had trouble understanding how to use the regular expressions
as built into Perl. He explains Pattern Matching, Quantifiers, and how not to be Greedy with your pattern matching.
However, the book goes far beyond the basics of regular expressions in Perl to various libraries which can be used
for parsing HTML, XML, RSS, and any text based file.

Chapter 2 of the book seems very heady as he discusses the use of Generative Grammars which is foundational
for anyone wanting to truly understand parsing. From Chomsky's grammar to Type 1, 2, and 3 grammars,
he details these structures and how to use them.

Perl modules GraphViz::Regex, Regexp::Common, Parse::Yapp, Parse::RecDescent, HTML::TreeBuilder,
XML::LibXML, XML::SAX, and XML::RSS are all discussed in this book and clear examples are given on how
you can use them to parse files to get the data you want.

In the end of the book is a section on Data Mining well worth the read dealing with Descriptive Modeling and
Predictive Modeling. For anyone doing data mining work from Web based data or from Relational Databases
this section can be very helpful.
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Excellent introduction
I freely admit to not being a Perl guru. This is one of the easiest to take in and most informative books I've come across for a while. I generally don't know ten different ways to perform a specific action in Perl - let alone have ideas on which way is best. But I use Perl daily to make my life easier. A big part of that is parsing information - in HTML, XML, from the command line output of tools and applications and from files and logs. Pro Perl Parsing pulled together and made much clearer many of my own hastily learnt techniques and processes, taught me some new ones and explained some of the odd results I've gotten in the past. The only criticism of the book is that it wasn't long enough - I'd love to see a 2nd Edition with a greater focus on parsing command line, configuration files and other 'administrative' style activities - it's not just programmers who parse. :).

A bit disappointing
I would like to find something more than a description of what modules do, and that's mostly what it does. Well, not was I was looking for. The last chapter is a smorgasbord of light descriptions of modules such as Text::Balanced, which have little or nothing to do with parsing, or with pro, and the chapter on XML processing looks like just a filler with little to add to the rest of the book or to the literature on XML+Perl.