Automating Windows With Perl

Rating:
Summary: An amateur, who got no help from his editors
Review: Rather than showing you how to use OLE or COM directly and extensively from Perl, as I had hoped, the book's main point seems to be that you can call VB macros from Perl. It offers little help in learning VB or the Windows-specific features in Perl.

To his credit, his approach is very Perl-like: Use Perl as a glue language to bring other elements together to do work for you. However, the book does little to teach you how. I was very disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Where's the beef?
Review: Such a promising title, too bad it fails to deliver.

This book is pure fluff. Don't waste your money on it.

Rating:
Summary: In defense of the book
Review: This book is not a reference book, and the reviews here trashing it do not take that into account. Anyone can colate the reference manuals into a book, but the author's point is to give real-world experience about using Perl on Windows systems to solve problems and make both administration and software development easier. The specific goal of this book is to show how Perl can be used as a natural part of a complete Windows toolkit, through real-world examples of projects and how-to information which shows how to get things done with Perl.

Rating:
Summary: An amateur, who got no help from his editors
Review: This book should be titled "How To Use Perl With Windows To Get A Big Fat Raise Raise".

Imagine the following on your annual review form:

"Automated my daily build to occur off-hours, thereby saving a hour per day for more productive activities. Provided free software and training to my colleages to automate each team member's daily build, providing a net increase of useful development team time of 12-1/2 percent."

Don't you think ought to be worth an easy 10-15% raise? (If not, then you really need to find a new employer.)

If that is not enough, try this:

"Implemented Automation interfaces in developed code to facilitate automated testing of code off-hours. Automated test procedures provided email report of nightly test results to all concerned parties."

I can not recall any book packed with more useful, relevant, and exciting information. As the title states, it shows how to use Perl to automate mundane tasks such as daily builds and nightly back-ups. In addition, it shows how to use COM/OLE Automation to advantage in your Perl scripts. Need a quick UI element and you don't want to use Perl/Tk? This book shows how to use Visual C++ to create an Automation DLL for the purpose of executing dialogs from your script, with, of course, native look-and-feel. Need to do some heavy lifting in C++? Need to drive the Automation interface of MS applications? This books shows how to use COM Automation to do the heavy lifting, drive DevStudio, and drive some of the Office applications.

The content of this book drips with pragmatism. It seems to emphasize using the right tool for the job, and avoids unnecessary heroics. There are some very thoughtful sections concerning anti-Microsoft sentiment, as well as what is good and bad about both Windows and Unix. This book manages to avoid both bashing or cheerleading, it just informs. It shows you how to use the strengths of the combination of the Windows platform and Perl, and highlights some weaknesses in the Windows platform that a developer needs to be aware of. (In particular, read the section on distributing a VC++ 6.0 Automation Server on page 125. This section illuminates a problem that would be truly dreadful to debug.)

The Perl used in this book is at a level that anybody who read the O'Reilly Gecko or Llama books should understand. The author seems to forego the geeky Perl power one-liners common in othe Perl books in the interest of clarity.

Quit wasting any more time reading this review. Buy the book and get back to work!