Average Customer Review: 
| Solid, but not great, book | |
I just finished reading Sam Tregar's book, and found a lot of things I liked about it. It's very readable, describes the stuff you need to know to write modules. I really liked his coverage of Inline and of CGI::Application, two facets of module writing that haven't gotten enough coverage.
| A great whirlwind tour of Perl modules and CPAN | |
This charming book provides an extensive overview on pretty much everything you need to know to write a Perl module, prepare it for CPAN and submit it into the wild.It's amazing how much this book covers: Not only does Sam Tregar show how object-oriented Perl modules are architected, how to write regression test suites, how to extend Perl modules with C code, but he gets also the community aspects right -- how does your module get really popular? You can tell that Sam is a successful Perl module author himself. Now, on every single one of these topics one could have written another 300-page book, of course. But the charming aspect of the book is that, while it doesn't go into each and every detail, it provides an excellent overview to future module authors. The printing is quite anarchic, though, with low-budget drawings and some typos which could have been caught easily by a thorough proof-reader, but it's tolerable, it's like watching a low-budget film by a very talented young director. If that's not enough, I found the last chapter of the book invaluable, covering the CGI::Application module, which enables authors to share popular CGI-flows (e.g. bulletin boards) on CPAN. I can whole-heartedly recommend this book to every prospective CPAN author -- there's hardly any coverage of this topic anywhere in the Perl literature besides the somewhat scattered online documentation. Buy it today!
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