Curl Programming Bible

Rating:
Summary: Some biased comments
Review: I wrote 7 chapters of this book, so I am not an unbiased reviewer. I also worked on Early Adopter Curl. Like most Bible books, this book provides complete coverage of the Curl language.

Curl is leading the charge into the next generation of web-based client-server applications. Curl is a simple language that unifies all client-side languages (e.g., HTML, JavaScript, and Java Applets), meaning you can simply learn one language instead of many.

Curl allows you to create applications that dramatically reduce the load on your server's CPU and bandwidth needs, while at the same time finally allowing web applications that have the same interactive user interface that you had before the web forced you into reading everything one page at a time. The book is accurate and includes many simple programs that allow you to use Curl right away.

Rating:
Summary: Some biased comments
Review: I wrote 7 chapters of this book, so I am not an unbiased reviewer. I also worked on Early Adopter Curl. Like most Bible books, this book provides complete coverage of the Curl language.

Curl is leading the charge into the next generation of web-based client-server applications. Curl is a simple language that unifies all client-side languages (e.g., HTML, JavaScript, and Java Applets), meaning you can simply learn one language instead of many.

Curl allows you to create applications that dramatically reduce the load on your server's CPU and bandwidth needs, while at the same time finally allowing web applications that have the same interactive user interface that you had before the web forced you into reading everything one page at a time. The book is accurate and includes many simple programs that allow you to use Curl right away.

Rating:
Summary: Great when getting started with Curl
Review: I've been involved with the Curl language for a while, and the Curl Programming Bible is clearly the best book on the market at the moment. It provides a good counterbalence to the online docs that are included with the Curl IDE (Surge Lab). I often prefer to have a printed version of how something works in front of me, as opposed to having to switch around through a ton of open windows on the computer, and the Bible is well written and clearly organized. I reccommend this book to anyone who is looking at writing an application with the Curl language -- it doesn't cover the latest version of Curl (the book covers the 1.7 API and the current release is 2.0.1), but the changes are quite minor so this isn't much of an issue. If you have already done a lot of work with Curl, then the Bible is probably a bit less interesting -- the new 'Enterprise Curl' book sounds more promising in this area (but I haven't read it yet).