Part III. Computer Science
From my point of view, there are two kinds of articles in this section: the half that are by me, and the half that are by other people. Among the articles by other people, there are two articles about random number generation. Randomness, by Jon Orwant, is one of those magical articles that somehow starts with a technical topic and expands like a 1950s horror movie monster to cover everything in its path, such as cryptanalytic attacks and Vegas mafia thugs. Along the way, he discusses the use and internals of random number generators in general, and Perl’s in particular. Random Number Generators and XS, by Otmar Lendl, picks up where Jon’s article leaves off, discussing many of those topics in more detail, covering the entropy source devices available in the Linux kernel, and finishing with an introduction to XS, the glue system for installing new built-in functions into Perl.
The two large articles in this section are by Sean Burke and Damian Conway. Damian’s article Parsing is a long and detailed discussion of his brilliant and extremely useful Parse::RecDescent module. Sean’s article Trees and Game Trees is another one of those wonderful monster-movie creatures: he starts by discussing tree structures in general, and works around to trees that contain data, and then to tree structures as the result of an HTML parsing process, the HTML::TreeBuilder module ...
Get Computer Science & Perl Programming now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
