languages and tools

But.. it is a little too short. Not really but I would have loved to have more book. The book covers just about every topic. I personally would have enjoyed to have more examples in each area. They made sure that there is at least on example for each topic. They even give some information about other competing products and about products that use Mason as it's base (for example Bircolage - I think I spelled that correctly). I am really glad the book to come out, it is a perfect addition to my collection of O'Reilly and Perl books.

Thanks for a great book!

I am using Mason for about a year. Then I saw the Mason book. My first tought was: "Why should I buy a book about Mason - The online documentation is excellent...?".

But even the introduction chapters of this book gives you new ideas how to get things done. Starting with the second half of chapter 4 every Masonsite developer should take a close look. He will find a in deep discussion about every Mason feature - and more (e.g. The Bricolage-CMS-Appendix).

I my opinion there is no discussion "to buy or not to buy" this book. The only question is "when".

On the one hand this book can be a bit boring for "new" Mason user and as mentioned before the online documentation is very good. On the other hand if you have your first mason-site done and read this book you will have very likely the urgent desire to rewrite some code.

But this is a common perl problem: "There are many ways to get things done."

I dislike the "Example" chapter. One of the big advantages of Mason is the possibility to seperate perl-code and HTML. This ist not very well done within the example-site.

Conclusion: This book is not needed to get in touch with Mason althought usefull - but if you are really starting to deploy a site I strongly recommend this book.

From the standpoint of a person who knows Perl and Apache pretty well, I have to say this book is all I needed to get going with HTML::Mason. There are excellent online docs for Mason, there are places Mason fits better (and worse), and there are viable alternatives to Mason. This book covers that ground right off the bat, and I like that.

I was able to configure a couple servers, write up some test components, throw together some quick admin tools, and remake a custom database web app in a very short time using Mason and this book. It may not be for you if you are new to Perl or Apache, but I think Amazon has a wide selection of books available on both of these topics. Buy 'em, read 'em, then get this one.

I highly recommend it.