chromatic has brought us yet another pithy programming-book review, this time of Damien Conway's Object Oriented Perl. This sounds like a good book for those interested in not only an overview, but a book that pushes them into at least a few practical applications -- but not one too intimidating to learn from.

Chris Redd asks: "I am involved now in a lawsuit where the basis is that HTML code is copyrightable. My question is, when can HTML code be copyrighted? Here is a brief explanation: I was brought in as a contractor to finish a website for an advertising agency because Company X (who started the job) didn't have the expertise to finish it. The advertising agency that brought me in did all the design, created the graphics and came up with all of the concepts (so they own the design/style of the site). Now the first company is suing me for Intellectual Property theft, saying I stole proprietary code. I don't see it that way, they didn't do any design, and any code they had was generated by a commercial program!" Strange, but I would think that since Company X were hired to do the job, then whatever they had developed belonged to the advertising agency that hired them. Am I missing an issue here that would make this untrue?

Reviewer Greg Smith here dissects a book aimed at programmers who want to add Perl to their stable of languages, but also useful to the Perl connoisseur. If your interest in Perl is more than casual -- especially if you're seeking practical code examples more substantial then in more introductory texts -- The Perl Black Book may be for you. (Read more.)

Kailden asks: "I've run across several references to Ruby, a scripting language that claims to be a hybrid of Perl and Python. Supposedly, this language has taken Japan by storm. I'm looking for Slashdot's verdict before jumping in. Has anyone outside the Ruby site used this language? What advantages/disadvantages have you found?"

Yesterday, due to system-level misconfigurations, www.apache.org was defaced after a root-level breakin. Those responsible for finding the holes and the ASF have been in cordial contact, and the holes have been plugged. In the process of doing that, FTP and other services on www.apache.org have been stopped. A mirror of the defaced site can be found on the Attrition.org mirror site.

Here you go: Philip Greenspun talks of life, ArsDigita, fame, Oracle, photography, and that sort of thing in respone to the fascinating questions you submitted earlier this week. Enjoy!

tech_imp writes: "Yikes! Talk about swift justice. The BBC is reporting that Judges 'roaming' the streets in Brazil will be using laptops and an app written in VB to help dispense justice. I'm not sure that I would not want to trust my judgement to a VB app ... couldn't they have at least written it something more robust ... like Perl? I can see it now ... your sentence is GPF :')" Three words that spring to mind: "General Protection Fault."

chromatic, lord of many reviews, has come up with a review of MySQL, from the folks at New Riders. Author Paul DuBois has gone beyond the technically comprehensive MySQL documentation to produce an informative and entertaining compendium of MySQL knowledge. Requiring little prior experience ("What is a database and why should I care?"), he explains general SQL and RDBMSs, as well as the peculiarities of MySQL.

Losing my love of PERL asks: "OK, here's the skinny: I've been trying to figure this out for quite a while now, and nothing is working. I need to send a proper e-mail attachment (i.e. something that will show up as a paper clip in Outlook) from an NT command line to be called by a PERL script (or better yet, just sent by the script). I've tried several modules and programs, including Blat, Mail::Sender, Mail::Sendmail, but every time the attachment is just shoved into the body of the e-mail. Does anyone have a solution to my problems?"

Couple of Perl Bits fell into the bin worth noting today: dlc writes, "The results of the Perl Poetry Content are in, and are available." If you're into this sort of thing, you'll dig it. A lot of clever stuff there. Course the sonnet generator is probably my favorite... hack it to generate rock lyrics, and I can start a band and record a debut album. ;) If that's not weird enough for you, check out the PerlOS Project. A PerlWM, a PerlSH, and more. It will strike fear into even the most hardened of Perl Monks.

I was just made aware of the somewhat old, but interesting article from Information Week entitled Open Source Moves To The Mainstream. In addition to Apache, the article also refers to Perl, PHP, MySQL and Linux as Open Source products that are "luring" developers away from commercial solutions.

Python is an object-oriented scripting language, similiar in ideas (if not in style) to Perl. It's getting more and more popular, as people discover the benefits brought by its simple style. It's a natural under Windows, thanks to good object-orientation. Like many free software projects, though, the Windows port of Python has suffered from poor documentation. Until now, that is. [Updated 15:00GMT by timothy -- fixed link to tutorial.](Read more.)

brink asks: "Recently it's seemed as if, due to larger and faster computers, lean and mean code isn't such an issue. However, it occurs to me that there's an overlooked area where there's little or no mention of the importance of efficient code: Web sites. This isn't so much in terms of HTML (I know that webmonkey had an article about efficient tag layout), it's more in terms of Perl, PHP, or whatever. It seems to me that the fact that your code has the potential to be executed in thousands of instances concurrently doesn't impress on anyone the necessity for uberefficient programming. Dynamically generated pages and DB querries are good examples, or just plain memory usage of your code. So my question is as follows: are there any good works to read which focus on programming for the Web, as in avenues the programming medium affords? Have I just been oblivious and missed them?"

Simon Cozens writes "I've written a summary of what's new in the 5.6.0 release of Perl for this www.perl.com article. " The article does a good job of evaluating what's come out - worth reading if you're a Perl Monk

ptb asks: "Since I am sure that someone in the Slashdot community at large has developed a solution to this question I figured I would ask. I am trying to get the company I work for to abandon a fax solution vendor for an in-house developed solution. I've managed to implement hylafax and faxing PDFs from a Web page works flawlessly. (I am embarrassed I didn't have to do more, but hey... ;) My question is: has anyone ever developed a Phone Tree under Unix? What I'm hoping to do is have customers call a number, have my Linux box answer and the customer presses '1' to order a document or '2' to order an index... You get the idea. If they order document '23532' then my perl script will fax them the doc. I've found ACS and Quicknet but I suspect that someone has traveled this road before me. Any suggestions?"

Frustrated Programmer asks: "I'm a programmer with seven years of experience on various platforms/languages. The past few years, I've primarily freelanced, building my expertise in C/Unixes/Oracle, dabbled in Perl a bit. Since my last contract, I haven't been able to find any work at all. I've learned Java2 to update my skills, I know C++ from university, however, I can't seem to get a break from any companies. I get the same response, no Java experience, or no OOP experience. I'm wondering if this is a problem systematic of Canadian companies (specifically here in Montreal), or do any of my American cousins have run into the same problem? Anybody care to share their experiences?"

ESR ^[?] sent a feature about the Microsoft Web Server Backdoor - interesting stuff, and makes some good points about Open Source.

Tom asks: "I've heard a lot of talk recently about how Sun is going the wrong way with Java and we need an open source replacement for 'write once, run anywhere'. What I want to know is: how many people really support this notion?" Although I think such a concept would be nice, Java has strayed from this and has become Yet Another Language. Don't get me wrong, like any language, Java has its strengths and weaknesses, but I'm wondering if the Write-Once-Run-Anywhere concept is better found in your average scripting language (ala Perl, PHP, Python and others) rather than large scale languages like Java, and C. Click below for more details on this subject.

Anonymous Coward writes: "/. gets an honourable mention in the current issue of Apacheweek. Admitting that ApachePDA was an April Fool's joke, Apacheweek says the gag snowballed beyond expectation when the story was posted on /. and the alleged PDA took 80000 hits in two hours. The good news is that Apacheweek claims a PalmOS web server port is already in the works and Perl has already been ported. The article is at link " Also noted in ApacheWeek is the article in PC Week where it's stated that "neither PC Week Labs nor Sun recommends its (Apache's) use in high-transaction environments". Then again, PC Week themselves run Apache. Hmmmmm.

In his responses to the Slashdot interview, Miguel shares the deadly truth about GNOME, the shocking story of the future of Bonobo and CORBA, and the titillating tale of adventure and intrigue that lies deep within the bowels of popular Free Software development projects. Okay, so it's not all that shocking, but Miguel has brought us some really great news and answers from his neck of the open source woods.