Book Review
Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software by Shawn P Wallace
Recommended
|
| ISBN: 1 56592 478 9
Publisher: O'Reilly
Pages: 454pp
Price: £19-95
|
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| Categories: perl
internet
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| Reviewed by
Steve Dicks
in C Vu 12-2 (Mar 2000) |
|
O'Reilly have an enormous reputation to maintain; every tome
with an animal on the cover is expected to be full of insight. Well,
this monster-titled book is no exception. It starts with the basics
of image formats; GIF, JPEG, PNG and MNG are all covered in nasty
excruciating detail--on the way giving simple insight the fundamental
differences between them. It then progresses to the basics of web
image serving, cataloguing a large number of web-based resources for
image manipulation libraries. After that the meat course: image
manipulation and dynamic serving using GD, ImageMagick and Perl. The
author has to be congratulated here on his use of examples; there is
no unnecessary CD, the programs are of the 'type, learn and explore'
variety--none of them are prohibitively long. After that, a section
is dedicated to the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (the GIMP) but
focused on the material already covered (the difference between
image formats and scripting the GIMP using Perl). The tail end is
devoted to client and server-side image maps, ASCII art as textual
graphic replacements(!) and an in-context study of PostScript.
The whole book is littered with web references to help you through
this enormous topic, just in case you need pointers to more
depth.
The area is a much ignored-topic at the moment--if you're involved
with web development using Perl, this book will open your eyes. One
for the bookshelf, although I suspect it will be some time before
the knowledge imparted by books like this actually gets used in
commercial development.
Other
Authors with the same surname
Wallace
Radiosity and Realistic Image Synthesis by M Cohen & J Wallace [Recommended] (Reviewed Sep 1995)
Windows Undocumented File Formats by Pete Davis & Mike Wallace [Recommended] (Reviewed Jul 2000)
Last Update - 13 May 2001.
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