Dear Sir,

I have the second edition of Programming Perl. In general, the book is informative and useful.

I write hoping that future editions of the book will eliminate the flippant comments on page 15: "Yes, we left subtraction and division out of Table 1-2. But we suspect that you can figure out how they should work. Try them and see if you're right. (Or cheat and look in the Index.)"

I have many years of programming experience, and all I wanted to know was whether division was integer division like in Fortran or floating division. When I looked in the Index under "division," the Index referred me to "multiplicative operators." The "multiplicative operators" Index entry sent me back to page 15, which was completely useless for division, and page 82, which did have the information I needed.

I remember seeing such flippant comments in The C Programming Language (Prentice Hall) by Kernighan and Ritchie back in the mid 70s. Such jocular comments do not belong in textbooks or reference books from which a user is trying to obtain information as fast as possible to meet production deadlines.

I hope that future editions are more oriented toward the transfer of information and less toward providing puzzles and enigmas for the reader.

Sincerely,
A. Zamora

Hi Antonio,

Thanks for expressing your concerns. We'd like to suggest, however, that your complaint isn't the attempt at humor; it is the inability to find the information you rightly expect to find. That is, humor becomes flippancy only when it substitutes for or obscures technical information.

The table that you are referring to is now on page 23 of Programming Perl, 3rd Edition. The "flippancy" didn't get excised from the third edition, and we maintain that it shouldn't have, though you should know that we thought about it.

This table appears in Chapter 1, which is called "An Overview of Perl." The chapter is just that: an overview. If it provided exhaustive coverage of very detail, we wouldn't need the other 32 chapters in the book. The one change that was made to the material is that it now points the reader to Chapter 3 for full coverage of arithmetic operators, rather than the Index.

Chapter 1 of Programming Perl is quite colorful and very Larry Wall, which is as it should be. If we took out all of the Larryisms, we'd have a very boring book, and lots more people would be upset. The chapter is meant to be read as a whole, not used as a reference on particular Perl features. That's what the rest of the book is for.

You may find that you disagree with this reasoning, but we want our readers to know that we often balance competing interests when making editorial decisions. In this case, we've come up with a solution to your information pain without losing the humor that epitomizes Larry's writing style. We feel it is important to allow the author's voice to come through, especially in a case like Larry's where his writing style mirrors his approach to software design. But you are right: it is our job to ensure that humor and technical accuracy are not mutually exclusive.

Paula Ferguson and Bruce Epstein

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