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Purpose: To explain the standard Win32 extensions for Perl and to update the first edition.
Audience: People with some knowledge of Perl and Win32. Designed to be accessible to beginners but not to teach Perl or Windows basics. The scripts are clearly explained and laid out in a simple coding style.
Summary: This is a much thicker tome than the companion Administrator's Handbook. It focuses in detail on functions and the relevant useful Win32 extensions, where as the Administrator's Handbook was more of a "Win32 Cookbook for Admins".
There's a wealth of useful information, this book has the potential to save you a lot of time. Dave Roth brings a great deal of experience to this book and it shows. He mentions many common pitfalls that appear to be the result of much pain, sweat and curses!
You could argue some of the module choices but the ones mentioned are all useful. There's a number of new modules out that I suspect weren't around at the time of publishing, however this book is still relevant.
Comments:
The code examples do not use the strict pragma because of the use of constants in the Windows API and the extensions. If you're lending this book to a beginner you may want to gently suggest they use strict and declare constants using the constant pragma (e.g "use constant Win32Xxx ==> Whatever").
Contents:
Chapter 1 - Why Perl Chapter 2 - Network Administration Chapter 3 - Administration of Machines Chapter 4 - File Management Chapter 5 - Automation Chapter 6 - Communication Chapter 7 - Data Access Chapter 8 - Process Chapter 9 - Console, Sound and Administrative Win32 Extensions Chapter 10 - Writing Your Own Extension Chapter 11 - Security Chapter 12 - Common Mistakes and Trouble Shooting Appendix A - Win32 Perl Resources Appendix B - Win32::ODBC Specific Tables Appendix C - Win32 Network Error Numbers and Their Descriptions
Chapter 1:
This provides advocacy for using Perl (great for handling management types) and some useful notes on installing modules and configuring Win32 machines.
There were some useful examples of Perl/Win error handling and formatting - this is helpful as it's easy to get confused as to where you should be looking for errors.
Chapter 2:
Network Administration. A lot of the interfaces used to retrieve information about domains, shareable resources, containers et al. are cryptic. Also a number of constants are used - this section documents them thoroughly, as well as the concepts and using the extensions.
Chapter 3 and 4:
Very similar information to Dave Roth's Win32 Administrators Handbook. Still useful, even if you have both books.
The Administrator's handbook was more focused on recipes to make an administrator's life easier, while this book is more focused on how to use the various Win32 modules to manipulate and report on files/groups/accounts/machines.
Chapter 5:
OLE/COM Automation. The concepts (which are complex and confusing, to me at least) are described clearly and well. Several subtle problems are described and I can see this section saving much time and effort.
Chapter 7:
Data Access. DBI is very briefly discussed as a worthy alternative, however Win32::ODBC is covered because it comes as standard with the ActivePerl distribution. DBI does have an ODBC driver but this is not as fully-featured as Win32::ODBC.
There are several pages providing a potted summary on SQL that probably won't add value to most. If you're new to SQL they will be useful.
Dave Roth, again, covers a few subtle "gotchas" in ODBC such as inconsistencies in escaping wildcards between drivers, outer join support, parameter binding, bugs in some FetchRow implementations etc.
He describes all the functions you'd expect; as well as meta data, managing datasources, and some more advanced features including cursors and managing rowset sizes for optimum network performance.
The ODBC API will be familiar to non-Perl programmers, and Win32::ODBC ties in nicely with the OLE automation discussed in chapter 5. There's plenty of material available for DBI so, this chapter is very useful.
Chapter 8:
This provides a thorough description of the various Win32 modules dealing with processes, the constants used, and some useful examples.
Chapter 9:
Various miscellanous extensions including console buffers which are useful for basic user interaction. These provide a simple and quick front end to perl scripts and services with some useful features (multiple buffers, password entry hiding, colour, titles).
Also covered are interfacing to the Win32 API, which allows calls into DLL's from within a perl script. This expands on the Win32::API documentation usefully, including more details on how to pass a pointer to a structure in C and some handy miscellaneous functions for memory allocation and ANSI/Unicode conversion.
Chapter 10:
Extending Perl. I am not a Perl guts hacker so I can't comment on the accuracy of the information, however the chapter was well laid out and seemed thorough to me. This would be useful for core perl programmers and non-perl C coders having to create interfaces. This has given me a better understanding of how the Perl core works.
Chapter 11:
Security. This is very esoteric under Win32. Fortunately this chapter is nice and fat and covers most things you could possibly want to know.
Chapter 12:
This has a good section on resources for trouble shooting as well as a big list of common mistakes
Appendix A:
Contains an excellent list of resources. Most experienced Perlies will be familiar with some of these but still very handy.
Links:
http://www.roth.net/books/extensions2/ - Dave Roth's site including some errata and various mailing lists, scripts (plus the code for the book) and other useful stuff.
http://www.newriders.com/ - Publishers.
