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Perl Graphics Programming Creating SVG, SWF (Flash), JPEG and PNG files with Perl

By Shawn Wallace
First Edition December 2002
Pages: 478
ISBN 10: 0-596-00219-X | ISBN 13: 9780596002190
(Average of 2 Customer Reviews)

Book description

Perl programmers naturally turn to Perl to tackle whatever challenge they have at hand, and graphics programming is no exception. Geared toward Perl users and webmasters, Perl Graphics Programming demystifies the manipulation of graphics formats for use on the Web. The book provides all the tools necessary to begin programming and designing graphics for the Web immediately.
Full Description

Graphics programmers aren't the only ones who need to be proficient with graphics. Web and applications programmers know that a dull web page can be quickly transformed into one that's interesting and lively with the use of well-planned graphics. And fortunately, you don't need the skills of a fulltime graphics programmer to use graphics effectively. From access counters and log report graphs to scientific plots and on-the-fly animated GIFs, graphics scripting is within the grasp of most web programmers. Using open source software, like Perl, you have the power to dynamically generate graphics based on user input and activity, easily manipulate graphics content, and optimize graphics for compression and quality. Geared toward Perl users and webmasters, Perl Graphics Programming focuses on open-source scripting programs that manipulate graphics files for use on the Web. The book demystifies the manipulation of graphics formats for newcomers to the Web with a practical, resource-like approach. With this book you'll learn to:

Generate dynamic web graphics with charts, tables, and buttons
Automate graphics tasks (thumbnails and borders)
Create dynamics web documents (PDF, Postscript)
Produce rich Internet experiences with Flash and SVG

You'll begin with a tour of the most common web graphic file formats--PNG, JPEG, GIF, SWF, SVG, Postscript and PDF--then you'll explore the most powerful tools and Perl modules available for manipulating these graphics, such as GD, PerlMagick, and GIMP. Included in this part of the book is a thorough description of the Ming module for creating on-the-fly Flash files. Next, a "cookbook" section includes practical, all purpose recipes: GIF animation, generating images within a dynamic application, communicating between SWF front-end and Perl back-end, XSLT transformations, compression, and much more. Perl programmers naturally turn to Perl to tackle whatever challenge they have at hand, and graphics programming is no exception. Perl Graphics Programming provides all the tools you need to begin programming and designing graphics for the Web immediately. This book will change how you think about generating and manipulating graphics for the Web.

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Featured customer reviews

Mostly for beginners, November 01 2005

Rating:

Submitted by mortenb [Respond | View]

I feel this book fell between two chairs: If you are a beginner you mostly know one tool or like to know one tool and would like to interface it via perl. You do not need all the other chapters. Why buy a whole book? For the experts the book covers too many tools that each chapters become too brief. It does a very good job giving you a nice start.

The focus is on established linux graphics tools and formats and then using CPAN modules to interface them. Unfortunately many CPAN modules like GD::Graph is dead slow processing large data.

I'm missing more indepth information like how to write an effective graphic language state machine (aka openGL), build 3D graphic-objects, Direct rendering support, Shaders, direct access to the png-lib, tuning your graphic objects for max performance under perl etc. clearly outside the scope of the book.

Perl Graphics Programming Review, February 19 2003

Rating:

Submitted by Justin Case [Respond | View]

Should have named this book Perl n' Graphics (png)....

Flash and PERL, who knew..??!!

wow.

Thanks for another monkey.

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Media reviews "Perl has enormous potential for automating graphics tasks, and for anyone with a serious interest in graphics--whether web-related or not--'Perl Graphics Programming' is well worth reading...Anyone interested in the technical innards of SVG, SWF, PDF, and PostScript formats will find information here that is not usually found in other graphics texts. There is a lot of example code, and extensive reference material relation to various Perl modules."
--Major Keary, PC Update, September 2003

"'Perl Graphics Programming' (PeGP) is the single information technology (IT) book I'm happiest to see this year. Not only is PeGP's content hard to track down, but many of the people who most need it don't even realize that the software PeGP covers exists. Moreover, the book is compiled with enough care to make an attractive and coherent reference of exactly the kind that deserves to be on paper, rather than online. Finally, despite its title, the book is valuable to programmers working in a variety of languages, not just Perl."--Cameron Laird, UnixReview, April 2003
http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=1357/ur0304b/

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