Catalyst
Catalyst
By Jonathan Rockway
* Publisher: Packt Publishing
* Number Of Pages: 200
* Publication Date: 2007-11-22
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 1847190952
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781847190956
* Binding: Paperback
Book Description:
Written for web developers with basic Perl skills, this book guides new users through the open-source Perl-based Model-View-Controller Catalyst framework using real-world examples and systematic code snippets, covering application design, development, testing, and deployment. If you are excited by Ruby on Rails but prefer the familiarity of Perl, get this book and get started. The way that many web applications are implemented makes development painful and repetitive. Catalyst solves this problem, organizing your web application to design and implement it in a natural, maintainable, and testable way. Its philosophies are Do It Yourself and Don't Repeat Yourself. Everything is written only once; database access and configuration are centralized; you just write actions for each URL in your application and Catalyst handles the details. Catalyst is designed to be reliable; the code is well tested; there are hundreds of production applications, thousands of users, and a thriving community.
Summary: A good Catalyst starting point
Rating: 4
This is the first Catalyst-related book to be published, and I'm very happy of this as Catalyst is my platform of choice for web application development. Packt seems like a great publisher, as it provides books on very specific topics that otherwise might end up being uncovered by the printed media.
Catalyst is a killer Perl application, and brings MVC web development to a new level. The main other available frameworks (i.e. Rails) try to impose the framework authors' choices on the developer (i.e. which templating system to use, which database abstraction library to prefer, ...); Catalyst simply provides a basic structure, along with a wide range of different choices which play well with this basic structure. This approach greatly improves the developer's opportunities to create customized and high-quality software, but it also has a downside: newbies find it difficult to enter the Catalyst world, as they have to make choices they're not yet ready to make, and so they might tend to walk away from Catalyst, leaning towards a different framework. Jonathan Rockway's book attempts to solve this problem, providing a beginner's guide to Catalyst where all the relevant choices have already been made by the author. This book tells you: "there's more than one way to do things, and this is my way; follow it, and then you might decide to stick with it or make changes but, in the meanwhile, you will have learned Catalyst".
Catalyst - Accelerating Perl Web Application Development begins with an introduction to MVC concepts and with an overview of the Catalyst installation. The main focus of the book is, however, development of applications, from simple to more advanced ones which involve complex database operations and authentication. The book assumes the developer already knows object oriented Perl fairly well, and follows a smooth path which allows him to learn Catalyst and the author's preferred modules: DBIx::Class for the database Model, Template Toolkit for the template View, and a selection of plugins. This selection isn't - however - a group of obscure Perl modules: they are the ones most widely used by the Catalyst community. So, what this book offers is also a series of "best practice" suggestions on what to use. The chapters on testing and deployment are a much appreciated addition.
Not everything is perfect. Code formatting, which doesn't feature any empty line to separate code blocks, might sometimes make it difficult to read examples - but it's minor thing. The part regarding the Authentication plugin is a bit outdated because of API changes - but things like this happen in every programming book. The chapter on the installation of the framework is just a few pages long, and doesn't cover the problems one might encounter - but it points to IRC chat and mailing lists where to ask for help.
All in all, this a good-to-excellent introduction to the Catalyst framework, and great first book on a framework which is becoming better and better every day. Rockway's work is the starting point for anyone seriously interested in building modern and scalable web applications, and in having some fun while doing that as well.
Summary: Worse than useless
Rating: 1
Don't buy this book. Seriously. The index is completely useless, there is no information on many basic bits of functionality (or if there is, I haven't been able to find it). Spend your money on beer and you'll learn more about Catalyst than you will with this book.
Summary: Very Disappointing
Rating: 2
|
|
|