object databases

This book is very much a regurgitation of the docs you can find online. They are incomplete, and so is this book. I've been coding db's for 15+ years, so I can spot a mediocre doc when I see one almost instantly. I bought this book to learn more about the connection attributes - I have found evidence there are more than 2, but all the book discusses are PrintError and RaiseError. Big whoop... I have found several bugs in the DBI regarding binding params for parameterized sql statements, and am also having a problem w/ Perl trimming right spaces on my char columns, which caused major headaches and a lot of lost time debugging. The book doesn't help w/ any of this - I can't find any info that will help me solve any of these problems, although I remain convinced there must be some connection attibute to tell Perl to trim right padded spaces, etc. (LongTrunc?).

The bottom line is this: the book is very much the same as the on-line docs, and then they added in the obligitory but never necessary SQL intro chapters, nonsense on a "flat file db", etc. They pumped up the material to make it big enough to be a book. There's more than a little something missing - I totally agree w/ Mr. Philip R. Heath (thank you for an honest, accurate review).

I'm biassed; I'm the primary author of the DBD::Informix module. And I bought my copy of the book.

The Cheetah Book has a lot of useful information in it. Obviously, it describes the core DBI functionality very clearly, but it also contains a lot of information that was not previously available in a form comparable to what is in the book. For example, the extensive Appendix B, which lists a lot of details about each of the various drivers, is very useful and informative indeed. The information is not yet available elsewhere in this format, and you'd have to download all the drivers to be able to get all the information in one place. The guide to using the DBI Proxy Server is invaluable. The non-DBI database information in Chapter 2 is interesting; it shows how diverse the Perl modules are. And the comparison with Win32::ODBC is illuminating.

There is information in the main text which has not been documented before, such as the "use DBI qw(:sql_types);" -- that isn't in Appendix A (the DBI Specification), either, but that oversight will no doubt be fixed so that it is in 'perldoc DBI' by the time DBI 1.14 is available on CPAN.

This book does not attempt to teach you the rudiments of Perl, and nor should it. It does not teach everything about SQL, and nor should it. It doesn't teach you about every possible use of DBI, and it shouldn't try to do that either. It is a pity that the use of DBI with the Apache web server and mod_perl is not covered at all, but even that would be difficult to do sensibly. Half the effort would be in explaining how to handle HTML and CGI and not in using DBI per se. Nevertheless, should there be a second edition, this is something that should be covered in outline, even if not in complete detail.

If you have any intention of working with DBI, either as a regular user or as a driver writer, you need this book. It is clear and pleasant to read. Having the DBI specification printed in book format is worth the price of the book alone; the rest of the material is also very valuable.

Go, Buy!

This book has been a valuable reference of mine for several years for web database programming projects. I bought the book soon after it was released and continue to use it - sometimes on a daily basis depending upon the project I am currently developing. I realized from the beginning that much of the material in this book came from the online documentation and have still found the book to be useful enough to stay on my A-list of reference materials. Applications like CGIScripter need to utilize up to half a dozen different databases so I have found the reference section on each database be the section I often turn to first. I have not found this info available anywhere in the online documentation. When you program and debug on multiple computers with multiple windows open simultaneously, having a reference book is often more manageable than opening another window on the computer. And for those times when I am struggling with an especially troublesome programming issue, I have found it very helpful to sit in my easy chair with a reference book like the Perl DBI book in order to research the problem. The only reason I am not giving the book 5 stars is that it hasn't been updated in a few years so it doesn't include info on some of the new DBI supported databases like SQLite.