Rating: 
Summary: A Good DBI Reference
Review: This book is perfect of persons of my Ilk. I know Perl quite well, and I know SQL and databases just as much. This tome fills in the blanks about DBD that hooks everything together. Most importantly, I finally have a comprehensive reference, instead of a bunch of miscellenous man pages sitting on my desktop :-) Knowing about the intricacies of each driver (in my case Sybase) clarified several issues and helped us solve some thorny problems at my job. More mod_perl stuff would have been nice, but when was the last time you bought a book with everything in it?
Rating: 
Summary: There's virtually nothing in this book
Review: This book is slim. About 1/3 is a DBI reference, which you can get free from the distribution. About 1/5 of the book (in the beginning), it describes Berkeley's dbm (and thus why DBI is necessary). So, what we have left is mere 130 pages to describe DBI features. The author uses these pages to explain only very simple things like: How to connect to the database, and execut very simple queries like "SELECT name FROM employee", get the result set, and so forth. The book never describes more complex real world problems, such as how you would execute stored procedures (for example, in Oracle, PL/SQL packages) get the result back through arguments, and other intricate problems. If you want to learn the very fundamentals of how to connect, execute, and get the results for very simple SQL queries, this book will help you. But then you can visit free web sites that offer such things. If you want to solve real world problems using DBI, this book offers NOTHING !
Rating: 
Summary: Made me scream
Review: This book is very high on theory and light on tutorials. I bought the book because I need to interface perl programs with my MySQL database (One that the book doesn't cover explicitly). On P79 they finally get around to telling you how to call the DBI. Then they talk extensively about handles and error handling (Before you can even write anything which could have errors!). It is P86 before they tell you how to establish a connection to the database (Not ask it anything, that doesn't come for another 20 pages, just connect). You need to know the data source to do so, they recomend the DBI->data_sources() method; unfortunatly they do not tell you what that method is, or how to implement it. (You ready to scream yet?) They include a small program to look up the information, but when I typed it in, it only gave me cryptic errors (Undefined variable in concatination - there was no concatination, or any "." in the whole program, and the line number was that of a simple 'print "\n";' statement). I am only 1/2 way through the book so far, I am hoping it gets a bit more practical in the following chapters, but am not optimistic. The authors seem to be very knowledgeable in their subject. They should have talked to someone who doesn't know anything about DBI (Preferably someone who is short on time and long on stuff that needs to be run) when they determined the content and layout of this book.
Rating:
Summary: very mediocre
Review: This book is very much a regurgitation of the docs you can find online. They are incomplete, and so is this book. I've been coding db's for 15+ years, so I can spot a mediocre doc when I see one almost instantly. I bought this book to learn more about the connection attributes - I have found evidence there are more than 2, but all the book discusses are PrintError and RaiseError. Big whoop... I have found several bugs in the DBI regarding binding params for parameterized sql statements, and am also having a problem w/ Perl trimming right spaces on my char columns, which caused major headaches and a lot of lost time debugging. The book doesn't help w/ any of this - I can't find any info that will help me solve any of these problems, although I remain convinced there must be some connection attibute to tell Perl to trim right padded spaces, etc. (LongTrunc?). The bottom line is this: the book is very much the same as the on-line docs, and then they added in the obligitory but never necessary SQL intro chapters, nonsense on a "flat file db", etc. They pumped up the material to make it big enough to be a book. There's more than a little something missing - I totally agree w/ Mr. Philip R. Heath (thank you for an honest, accurate review).
Rating: 
Summary: pretty good book, but so is the CPAN documentation
Review: This is a (the definitive) book on Perl DBI. I swapped book-for-book with a former co-worker for this. I keep it in the office for the newbies.
If you're already a pro at PERL, you should be able to get by with just the CPAN documentation. However, if your employer is footing the bill, get it. :-)
However if you're new to PERL and need to use DBI, get it.
Very nice tips and tricks you can pick up, even a few for the pros.
Rating:
Summary: very mediocre
Review: This is a good DBI reference for experienced perl programmers. The authors give you a good road map in the introduction so that you can find what you need to accomplish your task. I needed to interface to an existing database so I skipped chapter 2 on alternative persistent storage mechanisms. Having prior experience with SQL, I also skipped chapter 3. Chapters 4-6 are where the majority of people are going to find useful information. There you will find good explanations on connecting to databases, executing SQL statements, and some advanced features such as binding variables. The authors give a good treatment of the various ways to execute queries with performance tradeoffs. Chapter 7 is only useful if you are working on a Windows platform. My database is on Solaris so this wasn't something that I needed. As I said, though, what's there is good, but I there is definitely something missing. I needed to be able to call Oracle stored procedures as well as executing simple SQL queries. It would be nice to include some examples of calling stored procedures using the major vendors: Oracle, Informix, Sybase, etc. This information is hard to come by on the web. There are subtleties in using inout parameters in stored procedure calls that require some extra work in perl. You have to size variables large enough to store the largest value that is in the database. Since perl handles all string sizes dynamically, I used sprintf to force the strings to be large enough before calling the stored procedure. I don't know if you would run into these issues with outher databases, but it would be good to have this information with the rest of this text. That would make this fine book complete.
Rating:
Summary: What's There Is Good, But We Need More
Review: This is a good DBI reference for experienced perl programmers. The authors give you a good road map in the introduction so that you can find what you need to accomplish your task. I needed to interface to an existing database so I skipped chapter 2 on alternative persistent storage mechanisms. Having prior experience with SQL, I also skipped chapter 3. Chapters 4-6 are where the majority of people are going to find useful information. There you will find good explanations on connecting to databases, executing SQL statements, and some advanced features such as binding variables. The authors give a good treatment of the various ways to execute queries with performance tradeoffs. Chapter 7 is only useful if you are working on a Windows platform. My database is on Solaris so this wasn't something that I needed. As I said, though, what's there is good, but I there is definitely something missing. I needed to be able to call Oracle stored procedures as well as executing simple SQL queries. It would be nice to include some examples of calling stored procedures using the major vendors: Oracle, Informix, Sybase, etc. This information is hard to come by on the web. There are subtleties in using inout parameters in stored procedure calls that require some extra work in perl. You have to size variables large enough to store the largest value that is in the database. Since perl handles all string sizes dynamically, I used sprintf to force the strings to be large enough before calling the stored procedure. I don't know if you would run into these issues with outher databases, but it would be good to have this information with the rest of this text. That would make this fine book complete.
Rating:
Summary: proved its value within days of buying it
Review: this is a solid book that's been needed for a long time. it's a good introductory text for perl programmers on how databases work, and how to use the dbi to access them. i'm one of many who has spent hour after hour bashing my head against the dbi. of everything i've developed in perl, database interactivity and the dbi specifically has had by far the steepest learning curve. what i would have given to have this book six months ago. even though it comes after my painful experience, though, i've already found information in this book i hadn't gleaned elsewhere that will help me immediately in projects i'm working on. the chapter on dbish alone is worth the price of the book to me. i'm also glad to see a very detailed breakdown by major dbd drivers. my most significant problems were sussing out the specifics of dbd::informix; even with the generous help of jonathan leffler, i had a hard time figuring out some of what's clearly stated here. the one thing this book is missing is a detailed explanation of installing the dbi. addressing the basic issues for each major driver would probably easily double the size of the book, but this information is some of the hardest to learn on your own. since the book is targeted at perl programmers, it would be valuable to include the rdbms-specific information about installing the drivers that perl programmers are unlikely to have experience with. this information would also be crucial in easing communication with the various sysadmins and dba's whose help will likely be needed to get any perl-database project off the ground. i'd like to see an expanded second edition, or perhaps an advanced title, to expand on this complex topic. it would be nice to see an explanation focused for db developers and dbas on how to use perl for their work. kudos to alligator descartes and tim bunce for an excellent book that makes the dbi more accessible. once i got a rudimentary understanding of the dbi under my belt, i was quickly able to demonstrate perl's power for database connectivity in my work environment. by easing the initial learning curve, descartes and bunce are helping perl prove its reputation as an easy-to-use, powerful programming language.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Bother
Review: This is just a retread of the badly written DBI docs. Plus you have to deal with the authors' egos, and their peculiar insistence on calling their creation "*The* Perl DBI" and not just "Perl DBI". An irritating and useless book. Read the man pages.
Rating:
Summary: DO NOT BUY
Review: This is just a rewrite of a very badly written DBI docs. This is a very useless book. The supporters and authors of this book are very egotistic and encapsulated in their own world. Perl DBI newsgroup supporters dbi-users@isc.org are even more egotistic. What you get in the man pages is the same as what you get from the book -- a lot of useless documentation.
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