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Manning Publications Co.
20 Baldwin Road
PO Box 261
Shelter Island, NY 11964

RESOURCES

• Table of Contents

DESCRIPTION

An increasing number of tasks in application programming and web design requires creating and manipulating graphics. Perl is a powerful and flexible language that is not commonly associated with graphics programming. The speed of developing in Perl plus the large number of freely available Perl graphics modules, make it an excellent option for the rapid development of graphics applications.

Graphics Programming with Perl is a guide to the graphics and imaging modules and tools available to the Perl programmer. It covers subjects ranging from drawing your own pictures and dynamic graphics for web pages to rendering three-dimensional scenes and manipulating individual image pixels. The text is liberally illustrated with example code and programs that show how to achieve common, and sometimes not so common, graphics programming tasks. For the even less common tasks, the book shows you how to write your own modules.

What's inside:

• How to create charts and graphs
• Serving graphics content to the WWW with CGI
• How to modularize your graphics code, and re-use it
• Code to manipulate image pixels (and how to do it fast)
• How to work with text in graphics
• A complete reference for Image::Magick
• Examples you can use and build on:
• Adding watermarks to your images
• Creating thumbnails
• Dynamic web pages with charts
• Building your own convolution filters
• A web photo album
• 3D animation with OpenGL and Renderman

ABOUT THE AUTHOR...

A developer, architect and systems administrator, Martien Verbruggen is the author of the GD::Graph charting module and the GD::Text modules. He a regular contributor to the Perl Usenet groups. Martien lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and daughter.

Sample Chapters

Chapters 1 and 4 of Graphics Programming with Perl are available here in Portable Document Format (PDF); you need Adobe's free Acrobat Reader software to view them. You may download Acrobat Reader here.

Download Chapter 1

Download Chapter 4

WHAT REVIEWERS ARE SAYING

?Anyone who has spent as much time as I have lurking around comp.lang.perl.misc, could not help but be excited. Martien is one of the more frequent and more articulate contributors to that forum.?he has written an excellent book, well written and very clear? Highly recommended.?
—C Vu Journal of the ACCU, February 2003

"Martien Verbruggen has produced a fine book on all elements of handling and creating graphics with Perl... The section on designing graphics for the Web is, if you'll allow a slight exaggeration, flawless. I find the 'bullet-point annotated code' style of explanation gets the important points across well, and Martien has achieved a nice balance of explanatory prose and demonstration code."
—Perl.com

"My expectations before reading this book were that it would contain a few basics about graphics, some useful libraries from CPAN, a suite of examples and a whole world of pictures. Having been quite disappointed with O'Reilly's Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software, now some years out of date, I was not sure there was enough perl graphics code around to warrant an entire book. I could not have been more wrong....In summary, this book is bloody brilliant."
—Perlmonks.org
—Reviewed by Steve Marvell of Devon & Cornwall Perl Mongers

Source Code

Source code files for Graphics Programming with Perl are contained in a single ZIP or tar/gzip file.

Free unzip programs are available at www.download.com.

Download the source code: sources.zip -- 92 Kb, or sources.tar.gz -- 66 Kb

Color versions of all figures from the book may also be downloaded as a single ZIP file. The archive file contains images in either PNG or EPS format.

Download the figures: figures.zip -- 1.4 Mb