A heavy perl user speaks (was Re: Is there a good Perl book out?)

[Randal Schwartz]

In article <1318 at ethz-inf.UUCP>, wyle at inf (Mitchell Wyle) writes:
| I am still using awk because the book _The_AWK_Programming_Language_ is
| so good.  The examples in the book are useful and motivating.
| 
| Perl is better than awk.  The man page is slightly better than awk's.
| There is no book as good as A,W, and K's, however :-(
| 
| Are there enough of us who would buy the book to make it worth NASA's
| while to pay Larry to write it?
| 
| Is there any political support (politics a la X-windows) to get someone
| else to write it?
| 
| Is there a Perl-users mailing list?

As a heavy Perl user, and alpha tester for version 3 (a few of the
features in soon-to-be-released version were at my request), I dunno
about buying the book, but I'd contribute to *writing* it.  (After
all, I've spent roughly half of the past 15 years putting black dots
on white paper for various computer companies, and the other half
shuffling ones and zeroes around...)

I think Perl should replace almost *any* use of sed or awk (maybe even
grep :-), because it does things so nicely.  It was also written in
the traditional UNIX philosphy... build a toolset that is powerful and
robust and predictable enough so that you can do almost any task
"cleanly".

So, whadda ya say, Larry?  How about a joint effort for a book on
"everything you've wanted to compute in Perl but were afraid to ask
LWALL..."?  (And, when are you going to rewrite the Configure script
for Perl in Perl? :-)

Just another satisfied customer,
-- 
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