Object Oriented Perl

Rating:
Summary: The OO Perl Bible
Review: If you work with the Perl language and you want to explore the facets of Object-Oriented programming in Perl, then this is the book that you must have.
Damian's writing style is witty and informative, and keeps you from being bored. He gives plenty of examples, and explains the inner workings of each one.
This book is definitely a worthy addition to any Perl programmers library.

Rating:
Summary: For OO Perl, this is the book.
Review: If you've done the Learning Perl, Programming Perl and maybe the Perl Cookbook books, and still want to know more about OO Perl, this book should make you very well rounded.

Rating:
Summary: The One and Only Reference for OOP Perl
Review: In short, this book is a must-have if you are a serious Perl programmer (or thinking of becoming one).
As far as I know, this is the only Perl book entirely dedicated to OOP and it does a good job of delivering the OOP concepts of this popular language. The explanations are easy enough to follow, and there are examples provided to apply the concepts.
Having said that, the material organization could have been done a little better. I found myself skipping over a lot of things because they are simply not applicable in real-world projects.

Rating:
Summary: Useful but flawed
Review: More than anything, this book convinces that Perl only masquerades as an object-oriented language. To implement features which come naturally to other, truly object-oriented languages such as Java, one must jump through hoops.

The book itself is useful in parts, although overly long for its subject matter, and often confusing. Explanations are often made harder to understand by the examples, not easier. The author spends too much time discussing BAD approaches to a particular problem before showing us the "right" way.

Overall, inferior to "Advanced Perl Programming" in its approach to teaching OO-Perl.

Rating:
Summary: Kansas City Perl Mongers (KC.PM) Book Review
Review: OOP is the definitive book on Object Oriented (OO) programming in Perl. It starts out with a very gentle 20 page primer on essential OO concepts, and follows on with a 50 page Perl refresher chapter. The best hardboiled synopsis of essential Perl concepts which this reader has yet read. This is one of those rare books which will thoroughly teach beginners, and yet continue to hold rapt, surprise, and inform more advanced readers as well.

The book is a well paced introduction to OO, illustrating and implementing the core concepts of OO in the context of Perl. While the earliest chapters serve as building blocks to those that follow, the later chapters need not be read front to back, but rather as the topic appeals to the reader.

Topics covered include: inheritance, polymorphism, ties, operator overloading, encapsulation, genericity, multiple dispatch, and persistent objects. Each topic is introduced along with code which highlights how each technique helps to solve common real world problems. As various tips, tricks, and pitfalls are covered, the reader will often find themselves revisiting and evolving improved solutions to familiar problems.

A lot of languages implement a particular flavor of OO. And indeed, OOP shows a variety of the techniques and flavors of OO and how they may be implemented in Perl. -Explaining when and where each may best be used, and trade-offs involved. As a result, the reader comes away from the book with a greater understanding of OO, and not just a single style embraced by a particular language.

Conway and Schwartz are well-known and respected throughout the Perl community. Their writing is clever, humorous, and while information dense... surprisingly easy to follow. There is a sense of grace and continuity to their writing which made this book a real pleasure to read.

Rating:
Summary: Good at teaching you how to hammer with a screwdriver
Review: Perl is not an object-oriented language by nature. Perl-heads will debate this with me ad infinitum, but the truth is, Perl 5 added references and a few key words to allow users to mimic what other languages gracefully implement. Conway's book is good, detailed, and rich, but nonetheless its topic matter is fractured.

If you are forced into using Perl in this manner (as I have been on large projects) then this reference is indispensible. Better advice though, would have been to simply go with Python, which is not so nearly hostile to OO techniques as Perl.

Rating:
Summary: Makes perl more tolerable
Review: Preface: I'm a detail person, the top level view is what I ignore to get to the facts. I am entirely turned off by the normal practice of writing up one or two example apps, and then ignoring giving the full details on commands, such as what all the options are, or what the syntax to uuse is. If your app is different than the example, you're pretty much out of luck. That's the situation that other books I'd bought had placed me, while I was trying to learn Perl for a non-trivial app I needed to deliver. I was so frustrated I was nearly in tears.

I don't recall what caused me to buy this book; perhaps it was the only Perl OO book. I am so glad I did, because the amount of info that the author has put into this book is amazing. Not just that, it's the *choices* he made, of what to explain. He's picked all the pieces that the other books glossed over, and examined the missing pieces, so that I now understand the"why" behind many oddities, and I now can push myself much farther forward.

Sort of like, the other books pose the questions, this book answers them.

If you only buy 2 Perl books, make this one of them. Ignore the fact that the title says OO. Yes, it does a great job of explaining how the OO features mechanically work, but the reason to buy this book is all the extra backgrounder info that's in this, it's worth twice what they're asking for. The data often has nothing to do with the OO features, he's probably remembering all the details that HE had to go run down, and he's giving us all these data pearls (pun intended) for free, along with the payment for the OO data.

Don't buy this book to learn object-oriented programming, but if you want to learn how Perl manages to add OO features, and accidentally learn how Perl adds in a great many other features, then you're in the right place.

Rating:
Summary: The low-level "why" book
Review: Preface: I'm a detail person, the top level view is what I ignore to get to the facts. I am entirely turned off by the normal practice of writing up one or two example apps, and then ignoring giving the full details on commands, such as what all the options are, or what the syntax to uuse is. If your app is different than the example, you're pretty much out of luck. That's the situation that other books I'd bought had placed me, while I was trying to learn Perl for a non-trivial app I needed to deliver. I was so frustrated I was nearly in tears.

I don't recall what caused me to buy this book; perhaps it was the only Perl OO book. I am so glad I did, because the amount of info that the author has put into this book is amazing. Not just that, it's the *choices* he made, of what to explain. He's picked all the pieces that the other books glossed over, and examined the missing pieces, so that I now understand the"why" behind many oddities, and I now can push myself much farther forward.

Sort of like, the other books pose the questions, this book answers them.

If you only buy 2 Perl books, make this one of them. Ignore the fact that the title says OO. Yes, it does a great job of explaining how the OO features mechanically work, but the reason to buy this book is all the extra backgrounder info that's in this, it's worth twice what they're asking for. The data often has nothing to do with the OO features, he's probably remembering all the details that HE had to go run down, and he's giving us all these data pearls (pun intended) for free, along with the payment for the OO data.

Don't buy this book to learn object-oriented programming, but if you want to learn how Perl manages to add OO features, and accidentally learn how Perl adds in a great many other features, then you're in the right place.

Rating:
Summary: My favorite Perl book
Review: Probably the most informative and entertaining technical book I've ever read. I hack Perl for a living and own several Perl books, but Object Oriented Perl is the only one I consider indispensable.

One of the difficult things about writing a technical book is maintaining high content quality without putting the reader to sleep. Damian manages to keep the content quality VERY high, and at the same time write a thoroughly entertaining book.

And speaking of content -- everything you ever wanted to know about objects in Perl is in this book, complete with working examples. In addition to the standard objects-implemented-as-hashes technique, you'll learn how to implement an object as an array, a scalar, or something more esoteric, such as a regular expression, a subroutine, or a type glob. Other topics include operator overloading, tied variables, and persistent objects.

And, if what's in the book isn't enough, each chapter has a section titled, "Where to find out more," -- a sort of mini-bibliography for the chapter.

A must-read for all Perl hackers. Buy it now.

Rating:
Summary: The best text on the subject
Review: So you've been writing perl for while, you know your way around the camel book, and you even know a lot of the CPAN library. You've written a few CGI pages, and maybe even some mod_perl module.

But you can't figure out the point of some of those perl features. Blind hashes? What are they for? And that 'bless' instruction? And typeglobs- huh? Maybe you're puzzled by that odd syntax some of the CPAN modules use- $class->export($var)? What's that all about?

Relax. You've just stumbled into the world of object-oriented perl programming. And it's not as hard as you may think. Conway does a wonderful job of explaining how OOP works. His examples are perfectly transparant, and perfectly obvious. And he shows how OOP construction can be summed up neatly in three simple rules.

There aren't a lot of prerequisites needed to make good use of this book. If you've got a basic familiarity with perl, and some basic experiece with programming, you're ready to dive in. Conway even gives you a review of the necessary perl essentials you'll need in chapters 2 and 3.

A first-rate book, and one destined to be a perl classic.