[JaxPM] [NON-PERL] O'Reilly Releases "XML in a Nutshell"

[Nate Campi]

On the jacksonville-pm-list; Jax.PM'er Nate Campi <nate at campin.net> wrote -

On Sun, Feb 04, 2001 at 01:33:14PM -0500, JONES, WILLIAM C wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Lane
> To: j proctor
> Cc: Jax Perl Mongers
> Sent: 2/3/01 1:56 PM
> Subject: Re: [JaxPM] [NON-PERL] O'Reilly Releases "XML in a Nutshell"
> 
> On the jacksonville-pm-list; Jax.PM'er Steve Lane <sml at zfx.com> wrote -
> 
> 
> >> And the XML book doesn't look as interesting as Manning's new book, "Data
> >> Munging in Perl".
> 
> > anyone have pro-or-con recommendations on the new Stein book
> > on network programming?
> -Sneex-  :]

Funny coincidence, I was just at the bookstore looking at the new Stein book this afternoon.

You probably shouldn't put much stock in what a newbie like me says, but it looked like a regular "Stein". Clear, complete and easy to read. I didn't buy it, since I don't have a real need for that right now, but I suspect that it will end up on my bookshelf by summer.

On a totally unrelated (but still perl related) note: a friend of mine at work created a cool perl network program that seriously sped up our data warehouse reporting (I work for Lycos now).

A program would run for about 4 hours each day that (among other things) would request a "page id", which is (I think) a unique page on one of the lycos web sites. My friend put in a local perl "layer" that the program could make the request to, and it would get the page id and cache it for the next time it is requested. It sped up the process to about 45 minutes.

The amazing thing about all this isn't the performance improvement, but the fact that the perl process grows until it takes about 4 gigs of RAM (the machine has 18 gigs). I just find it amazing that a perl process can get so large and stay so stable. He ties the hashes where he stores that data to dbms on disk in case of a crash.

What a godsend perl is. "...making hard things possible" - Larry Wall I believe.
-- 
	Nate

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