RE: Programming languages that make DBA's lives easier

Great list, but don't forget Tom Christiansen et al.'s Perl Cookbook. One of the best books written about anything, in my opinion.

If someone's already a ksh or C programmer, then I think the beginning Perl library should include Wall's "Programming Perl" and the "Perl Cookbook." To connect to Oracle, you're going to need Descarte and Bunce "Programming te Perl DBI".

Cary Millsap
Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd.
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Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 10:49 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Shell - I have used Unix Shell Programming revised Edition by Kochan and Wood extensively. It's really all I use for shell programming problems. It's well-written and not a dry read.

Perl - most everyone I can think of will point you to the O'Reilly library
of Perl books, starting with Learning Perl (the 'Llama book'), then going
on to Programming Perl (the 'Camel book'). I have personally found Orwant's 'Perl 5 Interactive Course: Certified Edition' to be excellent, but I think it's out of print now. I think you can still get it on amazon.com. Then comes 'Advanced Perl Programming', 'Programming the Perl
DBI', and 'Perl for Oracle DBAs' Quite the exhausting list. Fortunately,
you can get just the Llama & Camel books (optionally Orwant's book in place
of both), and the DBI book, and munge through publically available examples, man pages, etc to get most of what you need.  

                          Janardhana Babu Donga

                          <jbdonga_at_ucdavis.edu>    T

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                                                   Subject:
RE: Programming languages   
                                                   that make DBA's lives
easier                                                  
                          02/18/2003 05:28 PM

                          Please respond to

                          ORACLE-L

 

 

What are the good books you guys recommend for Shell Programming? I have old
edition of UNIX shells by example (by Ellie Quigley). I need to replace this
with some good book.

Do I need to learn perl before reading PERL for DBAs? If so, what are the
good perl books do you guys recommend?

• Babu

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Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 1:04 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

I thought it might be worthwhile to say WHY I prefer ksh for most scripting.

As one writer put it, use a language you know. I've used ksh for years, so
that is certainly one big factor in preferring it. But, that aside, if you
use mostly the Bourne Shell syntax and stay away from the some of the Korn
Shell syntactical candy that doesn't do anything extra, then your scripts
are very easy to read, and are mostly self-documenting. For me, that is a
big advantage.

If you use ksh, then you need to become reasonably proficient with a few of
the more important utilities such as sed and awk/nawk/gawk and become familiar with good old regular expressions (wonderful stuff!).

One area where ksh is weak is its inability to set up a two-way socket with
a child process like sqlplus. Perl can do this (for example, by using IPC::Open2). With ksh, you can send to the child, and you can receive from
the child, but you can't converse with the child. Even with the coprocess
(which is a pain to use), you still have one-way communication at any
given
time. However, 99% of the time, ksh will work fine. For that other 1%
(OK,

maybe 2%), you either figure out a workable compromise with ksh, or you use
perl.

If you want some reading material, my recommendation is:

Unix System V: A Practical Guide
by Mark G. Sobel

(There is also a version for BSD)

This is a outstanding overview of Unix including sh, ksh, and csh programming; as well as good introductions to sed, awk, and regular expressions. It also has chapters on emacs and vi ("Remember, vi is your
friend."). Amazon has the 3rd edition listed with a publish date of 1995.
So there probably is some rather outdated info in the book on stuff like gopher, archie, possibly Mosaic (Oh heeeeey, cool!). Just ignore this. All
the other stuff is still completely relevant and presented in what I think
is the perfect level of detail -- not too verbose; not too terse -- with good examples.

Eventually, to get seriously cooking with sed and awk, you will need to get
something like the O'Reilly sed and awk book. But, for ksh programming: If
you work through the Bourne Shell and Korn Shell chapters of the Sobel book,
it is likely that this book is all you will ever need. Another wonderful
thing about this book is that it doesn't use the current trend of big fonts
with big margins and thick paper to create a monster sized book. Instead,
you get lots of information in a book that takes up little shelf space.

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