As its name suggests, this book is about Perl programming in the Win32 environment. Although Perl was originally created to serve as a script on Unix machines, its usability and power quickly attracted programmers and system administrators on other systems.

Perl is probably the most popular language for Unix sys-admins, and in this book Dave Roth tries to show how Win32 sys-admins can benefit from Perl to automate many of their daily tasks. The topics discussed are machine / network administration, file management, data access, permissions and so on. But not only sys-admins can benefit from the book - it is aimed at the generall programmer using Perl on a Win32 environment (like me :-)). For this, there are a few interesting sections dealing with process management, communication and developing Perl extensions.

I wouldn’t say this is one of the best books out there, but overall it’s not bad. If you are a sys-admin in a Windows network, this book is probably a must. If you’re just a Perl programmer writing scripts and general purpose applications, you can spend your money in a better way.

Related posts:

1. parallel programming
2. Book review: “The art of UNIX programming” by Eric Raymond
3. “TPJ’s Computer Science & Perl Programming” ed. Jon Orwant
4. Book review: “Programming Ruby, 2nd Ed.” by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt
5. perl master, C++ slave, bound for serial port programming

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 9:53 am and is filed under Book reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.