Book Description

Perl/Tk is the marriage of the Tk graphical toolkit with Perl, the powerful programming language used primarily for system administration, web programming, and database manipulation. With Perl/Tk, you can build Perl programs with an attractive, intuitive GUI interface with all the power of Perl behind it. Mastering Perl/Tk is the “bible” of Perl/Tk: It’s not only a great book for getting started, but the best reference for learning the techniques of experienced Perl/Tk programmers. The first half of the book contains the basics on how to use Perl/Tk, and then branches out into advanced applications with a series of extensive program examples. The result is a book accessible for novices, and invaluable for experienced programmers ready to learn the next step in the elegant and effective use of Perl/Tk. The book includes:

• An introduction to each of the basic Perl/Tk widgets and geometry managers
• A dissection of the MainLoop, including how to use callbacks and bindings effectively
• Coverage of the Tix widgets, an extended set of widgets that are a part of the standard Perl/Tk distribution
• Working with images in Perl/Tk, including bitmaps, pixmaps, photos, and how to compose a compound image type
• How to create custom mega-widgets in Perl/Tk, both composite and derived
• Handling interprocess communication with Perl/Tk, both with standard Unix utilities (pipes and sockets) and with the send command designed for direct communication between Tk applications
• Developing your own Tk widget in the C language
• Examples of web applications written with Perl/Tk and the LWP library Download Now »

Book Description

Your desktop dictionary may not include it, but ‘munging’ is a common term in the programmer’s world. Many computing tasks require taking data from one computer system, manipulating it in some way, and passing it to another. Munging can mean manipulating raw data to achieve a final form. It can mean parsing or filtering data, or the many steps required for data recognition. Or it can be something as simple as converting hours worked plus pay rates into a salary cheque.

This book shows you how to process data productively with Perl. It discusses general munging techniques and how to think about data munging problems. You will learn how to decouple the various stages of munging programs, how to design data structures, how to emulate the Unix filter model, etc. If you need to work with complex data formats it will teach you how to do that and also how to build your own tools to process these formats. The book includes detailed techniques for processing HTML and XML. And, it shows you how to build your own parsers to process data of arbitrary complexity.

If you are a programmer who munges data, this book will save you time. It will teach you systematic and powerful techniques using Perl. If you are not a Perl programmer, this book may just convince you to add Perl to your repertoire. Download Now »

Book Description

I decided to write this book for a couple of reasons. One was that I’ve now written a couple of books that have to do with incident response and forensic analysis on Windows systems, and I used a lot of Perl in both books. Okay.I’ll come clean.I used nothing but Perl in both books! What I’ve seen as a result of this is that many readers want to use the tools, but don’t know how.they simply aren’t familiar with Perl, with interpreted (or scripting) languages in general, and may not be entirely comfortable with running tools at the command line.

This book is intended for anyone who has an interest in useful Perl scripting, in particular on the Windows platform, for the purpose of incident response, and forensic analysis, and application monitoring. While a thorough grounding in scripting languages (or in Perl specifically) is not required, it helpful in fully and more completely understanding the material and code presented in this book. This book contains information that is useful to consultants who perform incident response and computer forensics, specifically as those activities pertain to MS Windows systems (Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and some Vista). My hope is that not only will consultants (such as myself) find this material valuable, but so will system administrators, law enforcement officers, and students in undergraduate and graduate programs focusing on computer forensics. Download Now »

Book Description

Perl is the perfect language for achieving Automation in Windows because it combines a painless Visual Basic style of coding with Perl’s strength as a scripting language for process communications. The new multitasking and networking approaches with 32-bit Windows require a radical departure from previous programming techniques. This book, dedicated to the use of Perl as a language to automate 32-bit Windows, shows how to control many Win32 systems processes without immediate user interaction.

The author explains how to use Perl scripts to automate tasks such as processing complex documents and customizing interactions by making a program look different to different users. Also provided are Perl scripts that will permit network administrators to automate tedious Windows maintenance tasks that range from automating backups to running a Windows system remotely from the Web.

Review
Written for those with some previous knowledge of Perl, Scott McMahan’s Automating Windows with Perl brings the spirit of Perl to Windows along with several handy sample scripts that can simplify the life of any administrator or advanced programmer. Download Now »

Book Description

This one goes on the ‘keeper’ shelf, for sure.

— Tony Lawrence, aplawrence.com

Combining the best features of C, UNIX utilities, and regular expressions, Perl has grown as one of the most powerful and popular scripting languages. The valuable Perl is often used for system administration, text processing and Web programming. It is even being used for more exotic areas, like bioinformatics. Perl is supported by all of the most prominent operating systems, including Windows, Unix, OS/2, Amiga, and others.

Pro Perl Debugging steps in to help resolve the dilemma of application testing and debugging&emdash;one of the biggest time commitments in a programmer’s daily routine. What this book will do is rescue you from substandard application testing practices. The book commences with several chapters that overview the debugger’s basic features, then covers common debugging scenarios. The concluding portion examines debugger customization, alternative debugging utilities, and debugging best practices. Download Now »

Book Description

This book is about taking over Perl code, whether written by someone else or by yourself at an earlier time. Developers regularly estimate that they spend 60 to 80 percent of their time working with existing code. Many problems of code inheritance are common to all languages, but the nature of the language makes Perl especially tricky. The reason why is that Perl is similar to English – bursting with irregular verbs, consistent only when it’s convenient, borrowing terms from other languages, and providing many ways to say the same thing. In fact, Perl developers have a motto with the abbreviation TMTOWTDI: There’s More Than One Way To Do It. While this flexibility is one of the language’s strengths, it also makes it extremely difficult when you are faced with an existing piece of code. There are millions of lines of Perl code being used all over the Web; much of it was built on an ad hoc basis, the creators never imagining that the code would still be in use months or years later. This book will be the resource all Perl programmers need to understand someone else’s code, even when it’s bad; repair it; convert it to a better style; upgrade it to the latest version of Perl; maintain it; and find and fix its bugs.

Review
Perl ranks among hackers’ favorite languages–there’s always another approach to a problem, always optimization to be done, and forever new techniques to try. Perl’s a hoot. But the culture of tinkering that surrounds Perl has resulted in a large body of hard-to-understand legacy code. That legacy code has to be maintained, extended, and adapted to new conditions–often without the help of the person who originally created it. Perl Medic considers Perl from the perspective of a programmer looking at code written by someone else and trying to answer the ancient question: “What were they thinking?” Download Now »