CS 368 (Summer 2009) — Resources

Class Texts

All of these resources are available for free online. Several of the books are available through Safari Books Online. To access these use the links below and select “Available through Safari Books Online”. If you are off-campus, you'll need to use the link “Off Campus? Login To Our Remote Access System First” to get set up first.

• Learning Perl, 4th Edition, by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy.
• Programming Perl, 3rd Edition by Larry Wall. The most official book on Perl, written by the original designer of the language.

Additional Resources

These are not formally part of course, and should not be necessary to complete the class. They are provided if you are interested in more information.

★ - A star indicates resources that one or more of the instructors have personally used and can recommend this resource.

• Bourne Shell
• JavaScript, EMCAScript, ActionScript
• Lua
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• Tcl

Bourne Shell

Unix initialization scripts are frequently written in Bourne shell, and it is a common Unix administrator's tool. Even the most bare-bones The core language is very small, and any non-trivial Bourne shell script will call out to other programs for essential functionality.

• ★ Portable Shell Programming by Bruce Blinn

EMCAScript, JavaScript, ActionScript

EMCAScript is standardized scripting language with at least three well-known dialects: JavaScript, ActionScript, and JScript.

JavaScript is most famously built into modern web browsers, and is the language that the frontends to Gmail and other Web 2.0 or "AJAX" applications are built in.

ActionScript is the scripting language used for Flash development.

• ★ Beginning Flash Game Programming For Dummies by Andy Harris — Most Flash introductions heavily focus on working with the animation tools, then later get to the programming side. This book leaps right into the programming side with ActionScript.

Lua

Lua is commonly used as an embedded language inside other applications, including Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, World of Warcraft, and Crysis (CryENGINE).

• Lua official site

Perl

Notable Perl applications include SpamAssassin and the engine behind Slashdot (Slashcode), LiveJournal, and the Internet Movie Database.

• ★ Perl Cookbook by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington. A collection of useful recipes for solving common and uncommon problems.
• ★ Object Oriented Perl by Damian Conway. Perl’s object orientation system is, put politely, eccentric. Conway’s coverage provides a solid foundation if you are interested in it.
• ★ CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network collects useful modules for Perl. The CPAN Search Site can help find useful modules, and allows you to browse the documentation online.
• perldoc is Perl’s built in documentation system.
  • ★ perldoc.perl.org is an online interface to the same documentation.
  • ★ Command line
    • "perldoc perl" shows the table of contents
    • "perldoc perldoc" explains the various perldoc options
    • "perldoc -f functionname" will document a specific function

PHP

PHP was originally designed as a scripting language for developing web applications. Many major applications, including Wikipedia (MediaWiki) and Facebook are written in PHP.

• ★ PHP official website

Python

Python is used inside EVE Online (in the "Stackless Python" variant), and YouTube. Industrial Light & Magic uses Python as part of their production pipeline.

• Python official website
• Documentation from the Python official website
• ★ Python 2.5 Quick Reference
• ★ Rapid GUI programming with Python and Qt : the definitive guide to PyQt programming by Mark Summerfield. Whether you're building GUI prototypes or full-fledged cross-platform GUI applications with native look-and-feel, PyQt 4 is your fastest, easiest, most powerful solution. Qt expert Mark Summerfield has written the definitive best-practice guide to PyQt 4 development.
• ★ Learning Python by Mark Lutz.

Ruby

Ruby itself is one of the top 3–4 most popular general-purpose scripting languages, but it’s even better known for being the language on which the Ruby on Rails (aka Rails) web application framework is built upon. Twitter, Kongregate, and Hulu are implemented in Ruby on Rails.

• ★ Ruby official site — not the most helpful site by itself, but this is where you get the latest Ruby source code downloads.
• ★ Ruby-doc.org — a great place to find all the core Ruby documentation and even the (now somewhat dated) 1st Edition of one of the best Ruby books, Programming Ruby.
• ★ Ruby on Rails — everything you need to know about Rails and then some.

Tcl

Tcl (the Tool Control Language) is designed to be easy to embed in other applications.

• Tcl Developer Xchange maintained by ActiveState.