Network Programming with Perl

by Lincoln Stein

Book Overview

This is a superb book. Another splendid book from Lincoln, whose mastery and lucid exposition make this a must-have for the serious Perl programmer. --Jon Orwant, Chief Technology Officer, OReilly &... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201615711
• ISBN13: 9780201615715
• Release Date: December 2000
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 784 Pages
• Weight: 2.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 7.2" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Everything you need to know on Network Programming

This book has been in my wish list for pretty long time, and before I actually buy it decided to check it out of my school's library. Enjoyment started at the first chapters of the book that I read in the library's caffeteria. The book definitely covers all the aspects of the Network Progamming, not only with Perl, but in general as well. In the first chapters of the book, Lincoln Stein makes good use of such OO modules as IO::File and IO::Socket to demostrate that difference between local file operations and remote network programming isn't that much different at all ( at least in Perl ).Chapter 2 shows you several applications that are built on pipes. The best thing about the chapter was the signals part, where L. Stein shows examples, catching all sorts of signals that your progam receives and reacts accordingly. One example was reacting to pressing of CTRL+C sequence of keys to terminate the progam.I would call Chapter 3 the heart of the book, since it goes over Berkeley Sockets, the base for Network progamming in most systems, no matter what progamming language you tend to prefer. It also explains thoroughly Sockets Addressings, Network naming conventions, protocols, services and a lot more. This chapter, together with the Chapter 4 alone are worth the whole price of the book, I believe. The chapter in the end goes over some common netwook analysis tools, such as "nslookup", "ping", so on and so forth.Chapter 4 tells you all you need about TCP Protocol. Shows several examples as well. Goes over Adjusting Socket options, and their uses. Chapter 5 is not anything newer supposing you've been following all the pervious chapters. Untill this chapter, L. Stein demonstrates the coding using much low level Socket API. here Lincoln starts using IO::Socket's Object Oriented Interface for its handy functionalities that enable writing Networking applications more relieving.Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 takes you through writing several commong network clients such as SMTP/mailing clients, Telnet, FTP clients. Also provides their complete source codes in case you just feel likek copying them. Chapter 9 gets into the most fun part: LWP and HTML/XML Parsing. Spends good 50 pages on those. Very exciting indeed!The rest of the book (another half) is dedicated for writing Server applications, which I haven't read. I am sure the rest is as exciting as it's been up to this point. But no matter what, I am greatefull to the book for such an exciting and informative coverage of the topics. It's worth every penny that you spend on it. Buy it!

Perl Guru Has Another Home Run

Everything you wanted to know about Perl and socket applications. Lincoln is very good about explaining all concepts and providing lots of examples.Lincoln is the author of the CGI.pm module. In addition, he wrote a book about CGI.pm that is the bible - a "must have" for anyone doing Perl CGI work.Lincoln is a great guy. He wrote a Perl module for Napster. I could not get it running on my Win32 system (my linux box was at work). Within an hour of sending him an email, he sent me a new module for Win32 that worked great. Lincoln did not even know who I was.

Explanation of an often cryptic topic is very succesful

The first thing I want to point out for many readers who may not know this: Lincoln Stein is the author of CGI.pm -- the module that is resonsible for a vast majority of perl powered websites on the internet. Second, Lincoln has contributed enormous amounts of code to the perl community, and I originally bought this book as an insight to the code of his that I have and want to work with further.Let me say that a lot of the book focuses on modules like Net::Telnet and Net::FTP. That isnt particularly useful to me because I have a firm understanding of them already.The real meat of the book, if you ask me, is the discussion of fully multiplexed servers that are able to handle many simultaneous upstreams and downstreams, and do a vast array of things.His code is very clear and concise, as well as commented and explained throughout the text. This is definitely something every perl programmer who writes network maintenance code should have.

Extraordinarily useful book

This book, replete with code, is one of the most useful resources I've come across. There aren't just code snippets here -- there are complete and useful programs, with explanations for each line of code. These line-by-line explanations not only make the code crystal clear, but it demonstrates how you can adapt the code to suit your specific need.It discusses the esoteric topics such as threading, sockets, parsing binary email attachments, and more in a very understandable and open fashion. It also discusses existing modules and their "hidden" usefulness (Hint: Net::Telnet can be used to SSH). The author is to be commended on his ability to make these cryptic topics understood.When I first flipped through Network Programming with Perl, I immediately found the solution to a problem I was having for the previous few days. A few more moments, I saw solutions to problems that associates were having. It's not very often a single book can do that without a thorough reading, but this one came through brilliantly.I strongly recommend this book to anyone serious about taking their Perl expertise to the next level.

Great coverage of network programming if you use perl

This book has excellent coverage of forking, multithreading, multiplexing, and non-blocking IO. Good coverage of this material is hard to find. Most books just concentrate on specific protocols such as POP, IMAP, FTP, SMTP, etc. This book also covers that material, but unlike other books, this one will actually start you off understanding sockets, pipes and signals rather than just showing you how to to use a bunch of libs. There is plenty of example source code here too.