OK the internet is great ’cause it’s full of information, and the internet sucks ’cause it’s full of information, not all of it good or what you need. I have spent a lot of time looking for an online equivalent of a well-written perl book (I’ll spend 5 hours searching instead of buying a $30 book ’cause I’m cheap like that). I think the perl community knows O’Reilly and others have some good books, and why write new online docs if good books already exist? I haven’t found good online results for simple tasks like searching and replacing across multiple lines. Until I went to Google Books. Boom, there she was.
Apparently you’re only allowed to browse a few pages for each query. When I ran out of pages, I just added a term from the last page and re-searched, and I could go further. After a handful of pages I hit the dreaded “Restricted Page”, telling me I was unable to read any more. It turns out Google tracks your views, associating them with your google user name, and only allows a limited amount of reading. To quote Google, “Google Book Search helps you discover books, not read them online”. The moral of the story: search VERY carefully so you find just what you want, quickly, or be willing to buy the book. If nothing else, the cheapskates like myself now know which aisle to peruse the next time we browse through the bookstore! Hey I wonder if the library has that perl book… there’s supposed to be a “Find this in a library” link somewhere… cheapskate information gathering tactics to be continued…
UPDATE: Yep, the Wake Co. library lets you search by ISBN, which google books provides, and they had the perl book, which Andrea will pick up for me next time she passes by. Sweet! OK, now I’ve just got to write some perl scraper that lets me search-and-checkout…
