Many years ago, I wrote a book called Data Munging with Perl. People were kind enough to say nice things about it. A few people bought copies. I made a bit of money.
Recently I re-read it. I thought that some of it was still pretty good. There were some bits, particularly in the early chapters, that talked about general principles that are still as relevant as they were when the book was published.
There were other bits that haven’t aged quite as well. The bits where I talk about particular CPAN modules are all a bit embarrassing as Perl fashions change and newer, better modules are released. Although it was still available from Amazon, I really didn’t want people paying for it as a lot of it was really out of date.
But today I got an interesting letter from the publishers, telling me that they have taken the book out of print. And that all the rights in the book have reverted to me. Which means that I can now distribute it in any way that I like. And people don’t have to pay a lot of money for a rather out of date book.
So, you can download a PDF of the book from http://perlhacks.com/dmp.pdf. Or I’ve embedded the book below.
I might even have the original documents somewhere. So if I get some spare time I might be able to produce a more reasonable ebook version (but don’t hold your breath!)
Let me know if you find it useful.
Also published on Medium.
How about a wiki (github?) to collect more recent CPAN modules ?
Thanks for the link. I just started learning Perl and I like it very much and also it really encourage newbies seeing such a great community helping others. In my earlier professional life I was a Java Programmer and I haven’t known of any author who made his work (book) public on INTERNET for free. This one enthusiasm of Perl lovers is the only thing that keeps me going on no matter what I got out of it in terms of career perspective.
I’d help on editing an epub 2.0 version.
It’s possible to have the link to the epub version?
There is currently no ePub version. As I said in the original post:
I’m one of the people who bought your book, and it’s one I still reference. Mark Jason Dominus made his Higher Order Perl book available for download a few years back, after I’d bought that one too. I consider both of your books to be among the most useful Perl books out there, and am grateful that they’re available now in ebook format. I’m a little sad that Perl itself seems to be losing popularity, but that’s life.
I’ve had some experience with ebooks, so let me add my offer to help translate your work into an epub version to KAcper Perschke’s.
I am about to move house and as part of the process I have thrown out a number of my books on programming. “Data Munging with Perl” is among the ones I kept. 🙂 Thanks for sharing the PDF! Some sort of wiki afterlife for it would be awesome!
Thank you. I bought it many years ago, and still use it. It’s sitting less than 2 feet from me atm. =)
I second David M’s comments – brilliant book on my bookshelf. Now my colleagues can read it without borrowing my copy, well done Dave:-)
I also bought this book and read it several time. It’s nice that you’ve made it available now it’s out of press, better than disappearing into a black hole.
For a e-book in PDF I noticed it doesn’t have embedded fonts, so depending on which substitution you have going it can look quite ugly. Now I’ve got a closer match to the original it reads a lot better.
It would be nice if you updated/expanded it, but I and others understand it’s a lot of effort for very little reward!
The link to the free book could be shared here https://metacpan.org/pod/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.31.0/pod/perlbook.pod#Task-Oriented