Rating: 
Summary: Terrible Book
Review: The major stumbling block for this book is that it does not contain worked out examples. Worked out examples are a most. Another problem is not completing started examples. For example, the book talks about SELECT statements and uses a simple SELECT statement such as, SELECT * from TABLE. But then the book gets around to talking about getting the data from a SELECT statement, it switches the SELECT statement to SELECT name, address, number from TABLE. They do not explain how to grab the data from the previous SELECT statment, something that is quite fundamental if you are generating a report. As it stands, it looks like one has to specify every field in the table the SELECT statement is issued against. Which can be quite hefty and something that Java does much better!I will look for a better book and perhaps a better technology, the Perl DBI does not look as robust as JDBC for database programming.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth it if you are serious about Perl DBI
Review: The man pages and perl doc just do not cover the details in depth enough for professional use of the perl DBI. While this book contains a lot of introductory material, the later chapters include many details that I have just not seen in any other reference -details that can make or break a program. If all you are is a hacker that uses ->do() everywhere, never check error returns, don't know what an array of hash references is good for, then the contents of this book are not for you. The man pages are plenty. But if you really care about performance, and how to write programs that make the most of the facilities at hand, this book gives the details that aren't in the man pages. For Perl programmers the Perl DBI is one of the most important facilities in the language. Understanding it depth is one of the requisities of Perl guru-dom.
Rating:
Summary: A must for using Perl and DBI!
Review: The only moan I have is that it didn't come out earlier. The shop where I work asked me to cost a project using Perl as the back end for a T1 sales feed into an Oracle DB. They wanted to know if they could buy a package to do this. After a little research, I fell over the DBI. They were amazed at the "cost", and delighted with the speed. I finally got the book about a week ago. Lo and behold, it also covered flat files. A large part of this shop's income comes from a custom doc library, flat files exported from many different DBs. So not only did the book aid with optimising the script I'd already written for the Oracle interface, but it's going to make all our lives easier for the next release of their commercial app. The book is extremely well-written. (In a past life, I was a tech writer. Nothing worse than a badly written techie book.) The flow is well thought out. Not being a DB meister, the first few chapters were extremely helpful. In my case (and I'm sure, many others as well), I had to get up on DBs in a large hurry. With the Cheetah book, I was able to do so. The examples given are concise, easy to follow, and they _work_. The latter point is invaluable. I would recommend this book to anyone who uses Perl and the DBI.
Rating: 
Summary: Try `man DBI`
Review: The only thing I learned from this book is what region in the UK where some popular megalyths are and how I should act while visiting them. (Which I why it got a 2 in stead of a 1) Unless you want to learn more about megalyths, try `man DBI`
Rating:
Summary: Browse thru it, but don't but it. VERY, VERY basic
Review: There's little in this title that cannot be found in the online Perl DBI and DBD documentation. If you've never done any DBI, you can just browse the perlDBI docs and then go to this book to clarify one or two concepts (like should I use DBI or ODBC?). After that, you'll never touch this book again. It is just too shallow. For a DBI book, it is horribly bad. There's a lot of DBM which does not belong in it, there's no discussions of extremely important classes like Persistance, the SQL introduction is useless, very basic & incomplete and does not belong here either -you'll still need a SQL book-, there's no discussions on implementing secure Perl scripts for both web & stand-alone applications, no discussion on how much or what to program on Perl or on the PL/SQL (or similar) language of the database Plus... there's hardly any discussion of the real DBD modules (Oracle, Informix, etc) as they apply to production. Information that should be bold and highlited (like Perl's DBD::Oracle does not support Oracle's 8 new structures or new OO datatypes). And there's hardly any real example of production code, only snippets of basic sample code. To tell you the truth, "Advanced Perl Programming" -which is not a great book either- has most of the DBI material covered here & with better explanations.
Rating:
Summary: Valuable reference for Perl programmer
Review: This book did not serve me well as an introduction or as a reference. I also did not feel that it had enough detail or "under the hood" information to fit in with the "Programming..." series of O'Reilly books, nor the organization of such. I still give it two stars, instead of one, only because I do occaisionally open up the book and "fish" for an example or solution to a particular problem. It's about as successful as fishing without bait, in most cases.
Rating:
Summary: Not very accessible as an introduction or a reference.
Review: This book did not serve me well as an introduction or as a reference. I also did not feel that it had enough detail or "under the hood" information to fit in with the "Programming..." series of O'Reilly books, nor the organization of such. I still give it two stars, instead of one, only because I do occaisionally open up the book and "fish" for an example or solution to a particular problem. It's about as successful as fishing without bait, in most cases.
Rating: 
Summary: Terse, but good
Review: This book does just what it proposes, and no more - provides a clear, clean, readable explanation of the DBI module in perl, along with a collection of handy notes for most of the popular DBD driver modules. Not a book for learning SQL, not a book for learning perl, but perfect for learning DBI/DBD and some handy techniques for optimizing db access in perl!
Rating:
Summary: still a valuable reference for multiple databases
Review: This book has been a valuable reference of mine for several years for web database programming projects. I bought the book soon after it was released and continue to use it - sometimes on a daily basis depending upon the project I am currently developing. I realized from the beginning that much of the material in this book came from the online documentation and have still found the book to be useful enough to stay on my A-list of reference materials. Applications like CGIScripter need to utilize up to half a dozen different databases so I have found the reference section on each database be the section I often turn to first. I have not found this info available anywhere in the online documentation. When you program and debug on multiple computers with multiple windows open simultaneously, having a reference book is often more manageable than opening another window on the computer. And for those times when I am struggling with an especially troublesome programming issue, I have found it very helpful to sit in my easy chair with a reference book like the Perl DBI book in order to research the problem. The only reason I am not giving the book 5 stars is that it hasn't been updated in a few years so it doesn't include info on some of the new DBI supported databases like SQLite.
Rating:
Summary: O'Reilly Does it Again
Review: This book is a quick introduction on how to write Perl programs that access databases using the Perl DBI. The first half of the book is instructional, and the last half is a reference for the different DBI's (Sybase, Oracle, DB2, etc). Programming for the Perl DBI is another fantastic book from O'Reilly. It's an informative read, and a great reference.
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