Average Customer Review: 
| Plug in, turn on, use Perl; | |
Lincoln Stein's latest book, "Network Programming with Perl", is a must-have text for anyone who is doing Perl network programming, or may be doing so in the near future. It reviews the basics of Perl I/O, explains the details of Perl's network functions, and covers the ever-evolving examples with line-by-line descriptions. From telnet, mail, ftp, and the Web, from Usenet News to custom services, this 650-page book covers any networking task currently known to man, and gives you the skills to manage the unknown tasks to come.
| 754 Pages Packed with Pefection | |
As an intermediate Perl programmer and a relative newcomer to network programming, I found Part 1, The Basics, to be pure gold. Dr. Stein's easy-to-follow writing style helped me to finally understand elusive concepts like fork, pipes and sockets.As the book progresses, it gently builds into more and more advanced network topics. When I hit Part 4, Advanced Topics, I knew was in over my head. Yet, I now have a great reference for the future when I need/want to learn how to play with Broadcasting, UDP servers, etc. One of the most valuable aspects of this book is his coverage of such a multitude of Perl modules, helping the reader to understand the each of modules' basic API in a straightforward manner. This book is worth every cent.
| Everything you need to know on Network Programming | |
This book has been in my wish list for pretty long time, and before I actually buy it decided to check it out of my school's library. Enjoyment started at the first chapters of the book that I read in the library's caffeteria. The book definitely covers all the aspects of the Network Progamming, not only with Perl, but in general as well. In the first chapters of the book, Lincoln Stein makes good use of such OO modules as IO::File and IO::Socket to demostrate that difference between local file operations and remote network programming isn't that much different at all ( at least in Perl ). Chapter 2 shows you several applications that are built on pipes. The best thing about the chapter was the signals part, where L. Stein shows examples, catching all sorts of signals that your progam receives and reacts accordingly. One example was reacting to pressing of CTRL+C sequence of keys to terminate the progam. I would call Chapter 3 the heart of the book, since it goes over Berkeley Sockets, the base for Network progamming in most systems, no matter what progamming language you tend to prefer. It also explains thoroughly Sockets Addressings, Network naming conventions, protocols, services and a lot more. This chapter, together with the Chapter 4 alone are worth the whole price of the book, I believe. The chapter in the end goes over some common netwook analysis tools, such as "nslookup", "ping", so on and so forth. Chapter 4 tells you all you need about TCP Protocol. Shows several examples as well. Goes over Adjusting Socket options, and their uses. Chapter 5 is not anything newer supposing you've been following all the pervious chapters. Untill this chapter, L. Stein demonstrates the coding using much low level Socket API. here Lincoln starts using IO::Socket's Object Oriented Interface for its handy functionalities that enable writing Networking applications more relieving. Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 takes you through writing several commong network clients such as SMTP/mailing clients, Telnet, FTP clients. Also provides their complete source codes in case you just feel likek copying them. Chapter 9 gets into the most fun part: LWP and HTML/XML Parsing. Spends good 50 pages on those. Very exciting indeed! The rest of the book (another half) is dedicated for writing Server applications, which I haven't read. I am sure the rest is as exciting as it's been up to this point. But no matter what, I am greatefull to the book for such an exciting and informative coverage of the topics. It's worth every penny that you spend on it. Buy it!
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