[PLUG] Book Recommendation

[Barry Roomberg <broom@voicenet.com>]

Ahh, that's DIFFERENT!

I always support a known employee's efforts to do more for the current company
and save them money.  Which is different from your initial description.

The "Coriolis Perl Black Book" (this big one, not the handbook) is the best
Perl tutorial I've ever seen.  I've got DOZENS.  You can't live without the 
Camel, but it assumes you know what you are looking for.

"Effective Perl Programming" is GREAT.  But don't try to read it until
you've gone throught the Black Book, and have the Camel by
your side when you do.

The "Cookbook" is a gold mine.

You NEED the Owl book, ie: "Mastering Regular Expressions"

"Perl for System Administrators" is also pretty good, epecially
if you are doing administration.    

If you are into objects, "Object Oriented Perl" is really good.  Damian Conway 
is brilliant.

Anything by Sams should be burned.

I've just scratched the surface. 

Note:  Everything you've said still tells me you are a nubie.  It felt like  
you claimed to be a DBA in your previous post but now you tell me you really 
do almost nothing.  But you are a known nubie who is trying.

And it REALLY depends on the quality of the scripts being left behind
on whether or not you would ever need to touch them.  If they break (and 
EVERYTHING breaks sooner or later) but you don't truly grok them,
you WILL be doing damage when you make a change and don't
realize the mistake.  It might take a year or 2 before you realize it,
and it might be too late.

How much Perl is currently involved? Find someone who knows Perl to judge its 
quality.  Does it check for file open failures?  Does it shell out to 
external command without grepping for error messages in the return?  Does it 
ALWAYS check for error conditions when return from any system call?   If it 
writes data, does it check to see that it wrote the same amount it expected 
too? That type of stuff will tell you the amount of pain you are in for if 
you try to take it over.

> Thanks for the book recommendations which is all I asked for.
You are welcome.  Enjoy.

Barry


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