Review by for Cgi Developer’s Resource: Web Programming in Tcl and Perl (Resource Series)
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This was required reading for a web applications class. I am sorry I wasted money on it. The writing alternated between tedious and redundant. The editing was so bad I found typos in every page. The graphics looked like something out of an elementary school art project. More important, they interfered with the text and made it difficult to read. Every page was an eyesore. What little valuable information I could glean from the text wasn’t worth the wading. The publisher should be ashamed. Midway through the course, I threw the book in a corner in disgust. Save your money.

Review by D. Fischer for Cgi Developer’s Resource: Web Programming in Tcl and Perl (Resource Series)
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I too am sorry I spent the money on this one. I also noticed the bad production techniques on the graphics and found some sections to be very thin on the info. I was looking for (the guts of doing cgi-sendmail, not just the use of a cookbook module …) I guess I’ll just wait for the Black Book version coming out — I’ve found these to be real good.

Review by for Cgi Developer’s Resource: Web Programming in Tcl and Perl (Resource Series)
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I found much useful information in this book though it wasn’t easy, wading through all the typos and sidebars which blended the backgroud color to the text color. Nearly unreadable. Mr. Ivler’s book was not done justice by this publisher.

Review by for Cgi Developer’s Resource: Web Programming in Tcl and Perl (Resource Series)
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As others pointed out, the sidebars are unreadable because the background is a graduated greyscale that turns as black as midnight toward the bottom.The information is poorly organized, incomplete and often incorrect.They borrow buggy code from other sources then admonish the readers on page 575 not to copy the code for their own use.

Review by J. Turner for Cgi Developer’s Resource: Web Programming in Tcl and Perl (Resource Series)
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This is an introductory book on CGI, with examples written in both TCL and Perl. It is a great idea for a book; unfortunately, this is a poor implementation of that idea.Source code listings, tips, and notes are presented in way to make them almost unreadable (black text on a dark gray background). Notes and tips are written in a font designed to mimic handwriting, but makes it even more unreadable. I’m not talking distracting or unique, but unreadable. On page 73, the gray background gets darker the further the text progresses down the page, until you have black on black. A portion of that page is totally unreadable. This continues throughout the book. I am stunned that Prentice Hall didn’t catch this. The design of this book is horrible.Mr. Ivler aims the book for people comfortable with TCL or Perl (and UNIX), yet spends three chapters introducing the HTML protocol, firewalls, and other topics. The author’s focus seems confused throughout the book and the author(s) loose sight of who the audience is frequently. More or less, the second half of the book ends up documenting their scripts.I also found the copyright notice offensive (page 575)… that informs the readers that Ivler and Husain owned the code (fair enough), but also owned any modifications you make to the code (yeah, right). On the plus side, it does have code you can cut and paste into your own projects and demonstrates what you can do with CGI on a limited scale, albeit without a lot of depth.

Review by for Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software (O’Reilly Nutshell)
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This is not an art book. There are not even any color illustrations. Rather, there is uniquely definitive and comprehensive coverage of the most important freeware graphics tools useful for web development. There is a strong bias toward programmatic tools, those which can be controlled from server-parsed HTML or CGI using Perl, which allow drawing graphics interactively with the user on the fly. One example with source code is a Perl “biorhythm” calculator, where the user enters a birthdate and the web page draws a customized GIF bar chart with a sinusoidal envelope, emulating the coin-operated “biorhythm” machine at the Vince Lombardi Rest Area on I-95 in New Jersey. This basic technique can be used for charts of stock performance, server activity, and any other on-demand drawing. The ImageMagick tool, which can be run from a command line to do batch processing (such as thumbnailing) or through a Perl API, is also well covered, showing how to draw text labels onto images and do other tasks essential to good web practice. The GIMP, a web-friendly freeware clone of Adobe Photoshop, is covered primarily from the point of view of its relatively unknown Perl API, but this is not a book about the GIMP and there are better choices of books (especially those with color) if interactive use of the GIMP is your main concern. However, use of the GIMP to create basic web elements such as flaming marbles or imploding cats is covered. This book stands in a class by itself on its subject matter, and is destined to become one of the classic O’Reilly references. While it does have copious pointers to web information via URLs, the book’s most serious deficiency is certainly that it is heavily tied to the current snapshot of available tools, and the freeware tool development pace will doubtlessly necessitate frequent revisions of this book, possibly as often as annually. The author is also to be commended for not flinching from discussions of technical issues where appropriate, such as image compression, interlacing, and the internals of GIF, JPEG, and PNG file formats, but these discussions are not essential to the book if the reader has little interest in technical issues and wants to get right to the cookbook graphics recipes.

Review by for Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software (O’Reilly Nutshell)
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It’s a reasonable start if you want to work with GD, ImageMagick and others, but it’s too much a printed version of the manpages. With examples and some tips though. It also adresses GIMP but fails to provide indept info on scripting GIMP.

Review by for Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software (O’Reilly Nutshell)
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I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can only stand to grab data out of a text file so many times… I have never done graphics programming before and found this book to be a nice introduction. I did notice that there wasn’t a lot of troubleshooting information in the book so if you are experienced programming graphics, this book is probably a waste of your time and $$$, you would be better off busting out your lazerjet and printing the man pages…Anyway, I really enjoyed this book and plan on using ImageMagick in my next project!If you want something thats a slight change of pace, give this a try!

Review by for Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software (O’Reilly Nutshell)
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I have no other option but accepting most of the negative reviews submitted to this book ( Graphics Programming with Perl and GNU software ). The book is definitely one of the horrible books that O’reilly was ever unfortunate enough to publish. I believe a similar title by “Manning” publication does a better job than this one. If you need the facts, read on.If you want to purchase this book to learn how to program web graphics with Perl, stop right here and go to CPAN.org. Search for GD, GD::Graph and ImageMagick and read their manuals. That’s all this book does any ways.The only chapter I enjoyed was chapter one, “Image File Formats”, which at least taught me something I hadn’t known before. Outlines of the chapters follow. Chapter one – “Image File Formats” covers most of the basics you need to know to understand the anatomy of graphics, their compression algorithms and different formats available for the web, as well as their pros and cons. This is the chapter I enjoyed most. The chapter lasts over 30 pages.Chapter two – “Serving graphics on the Web” talks a bit about serving images from within Perl. Talks how the browser loads the images, image load time and image caching. Shows the tag, and its attributes. Lasts another 30 pages.Chapter 3 – “A Litany of Libraries” lists references to some of the graphics libraries available on the web. I would expect to see this chapter as an appendix.Starting chapter 4 – “On-the-Fly graphics with GD” is the start of all the disappointment, and to some extent, annoyance. After a clumsy introduction to GD and some of its classes and methods, starts coding a chess board. The application itself is not so useful, but the code is worth consideration. The chapter also lists all the methods available through GD classes with some description of each.Chapter 5, 6 and 7 are written in the same style as the above sibling. They concentrate on Image::Magic (also known as PerlMagick), GD::Graph (previously known as GIFgraph ) and Gimp respectively. Chapter 7 teaches how to write Gimp Plug-ins. You might consider this chapter if you’re a Gimp user/fan.

Review by for Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software (O’Reilly Nutshell)
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This book is exacly what you need for creating dynamic webpages. It covers everything from file types to advanced image manuipulation functions. This book is well written so it is easy to understand even if you aren’t familiar with PERL yet. I sincerely recommend it if you are going to create graphics on the web.