Orwant - Web, Graphics & Perl/Tk Programming

This is the second of three Best of the Perl Journal OReilly books, containing the crme de la crme of the 247 articles published during the Perl Journals 5-year existence as a standalone magazine. This particular book contains 39 articles covering the web, graphics, and Perl/Tk.

This book is divided into three sections:

This section contains 22 articles on how Perl can make the web do your bidding: CGI scripting, Apache/mod_perl programming, content management, the LWP library, securing and bulletproofing your web server, automating deductions about web page content, and even transmitting web pages wirelessly.

The nine articles in this section cover graphics, from the simple (generating charts and logos) to the advanced (OpenGL programming, ray tracing, evolving images, digitizing video) to the practical (generating images with the Gimp, and creating graphical applications with Glade and Gnome on Linux).

Perl/Tk is Perls most popular GUI toolkit, letting you create Perl-controlled graphical applications in minutes. This final section contains eight articles, six written by Perl/Tk guru Steve Lidie. Steve is also a co-author of Mastering Perl/Tk (OReilly); if the material here whets your appetite, look there for the full meal.

Be aware that this book has 23 different authors. Each section, and the articles within them, are loosely ordered from general to specific, and also from easiest to hardest where possible. (It wasnt always possible.) The book may be read straight through, or sampled at random. (In deference to the Perl motto, Theres More Than One Way To Read It.)

Normally, OReilly likes their books to be written by one author, or just a few. Books that are collections of many independently-written chapters may get to press more quickly, but discordant tones, styles, and levels of exposition are jarring to the reader; worse, authors writing in parallel and under deadline rarely know what other contributors have covered, and therefore cant provide the appropriate context to the reader.

That would indeed be a problem for this book had it been written in two months by 23 authors writing simultaneously. But in a sense, this book was written very carefully and methodically over six years.

Heres why. As editor of The Perl Journal, I had a difficult decision to make with every issue. TPJ was a grassroots publication with no professional publishing experience behind it; I couldnt afford to take out full color ads or launch huge direct-mail campaigns. So word of the magazine spread slowly, and instead of a steady circulation, it started tiny (400 subscribers for issue #1) and grew by several hundred each issue until EarthWeb began producing the magazine with issue #13.

Every issue, there were a lot of new subscribers, many of whom were new to Perl. Common sense dictated that I should include beginner articles in every issue. But I didnt like where that line of reasoning led. If I catered to the novices in every issue, far too many articles would be about beginner topics, crowding out the advanced material. And Id have to find a way to cover the important material over and over, imparting a fresh spin every time. Steve Lidies Perl/Tk column was a good example: it started with the basics and delved deeper with every article. Readers new to Perl/Tk who began with TPJ #15 didnt need to know about the intricacies of Perl/Tk menus covered in that issue; they wanted to know how to create a basic Perl/Tk applicationcovered way back in TPJ #1. But if I periodically reset topics and ran material already covered in past issues, I might alienate long-time subscribers.

So I did something very unusual for a magazine: I made it easy (and cheap) for subscribers to get every single back issue when they subscribed, so theyd always have the introductory material. As a result, I had to keep reprinting back issues as I ran out. This is what business calls a Supply Chain Management problem. The solution: my basement.

A side-effect of this approach was that the articles hold well together: they tell a consistent story in a steady progression from TPJ #1 through TPJ #20, with little redundancy between them. TPJ was always a bookit just happened to be published in 20 quarterly installments.

There is another advantage to having a book with programs by 23 Perl experts: collectively, they constitute a good sampling of Perl in the wild. Every author has his own preferenceswhether its use of the English pragma, prototyping subroutines, embracing or eschewing object-oriented programming, or any of the other myriad ways in which Perls expressivity is enjoyed. When you read a book by one author, you experience a single coherent (and hopefully good) style; when you read a book by dozens of experienced authors, you benefit from the diversity. Its an Olympic-size meme pool.

Naturally, theres some TPJ material that doesnt hold up well over age: modules become obsolete, features change, and news becomes history. Those articles didnt make the cut; the rest are in this book and its two companions, Computer Science & Perl Programming: Best of the Perl Journal and Games, Diversions, and Perl Culture: Best of the Perl Journal.

Enjoy!