little_plack_book

little_plack_book copied to clipboard

The Little Plack Book

Plack is superglue for modern Perl web applications.

Plack is a toolkit for building, deploying, managing, and reusing all of the moving parts necessary to bring your Perl code to the web. It builds on the simple-but-effective PSGI standard and allows you to concentrate on what's most important: writing great code.

Plack and PSGI are compatible with dozens of web servers, pure-Perl and otherwise, and dozens of great web frameworks and toolkits. Plack also offers access to the ever-expanding world of middleware and components for everything from authentication and access control to logging, debugging, and security filtering.

Modern Perl demands a modern approach to the web. Welcome to Plack.

Intended Audience

Readers should have some familiarity with web programming in general: how web servers work, the basics of HTTP, and HTML.

Readers should also be comfortable with Perl and the CPAN. If you've read Modern Perl, you should be ready.

Reviewer Guidelines

I appreciate all suggestions and critiques, especially:

• is the work accurate?
• is the work complete?
• is the work coherent?
• are there missing sections and subjects?
• are the examples effective?
• is the flow of information appropriate?

Building this Book

You need a modern version of Perl installed. I recommend at least Perl 5.12, but anything newer than 5.8.6 should work.

You should also have Pod::PseudoPod 0.16 or newer installed with its dependencies.

From the top level directory of a checkout, build the individual chapters with:

$ perl build/tools/build_chapters.pl

The chapter sources are in the sections/ directory. Each chapter has a corresponding chapter_nn.pod file. Each file contains multiple POD links which refer to other files in the sections/ directory. Each of those files contains a PseudoPOD Z<> anchor.

The build_chapters.pl program weaves these sections into chapters and writes them to POD files in build/chapters.

(This process makes it easy to rearrange sections within and between chapters without generating huge diffs.)

To build HTML from these woven chapters:

$ perl build/tools/build_html.pl

This will produce nicely-formatted HTML in the build/html/ directory. If anything looks wrong, it's a mistake on my part (or a CSS problem) and patches are very welcome.

To build an ePub eBook from the woven chapters:

$ perl build/tools/build_epub.pl

This will produce an ePub eBook in the build/epub/ directory.

To build PDFs from the chapters:

$ perl build/tools/build_pdf.pl

This will build PDFs in the build/pdf directory. You must have App::pod2pdf installed from the CPAN.

Contributing

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. For more details, see:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/

Please feel free to point people to this repository. Suggestions and contributions are welcome. For now, please refrain from distributing modified versions. Instead, please file bugs or submit pull requests against this repository.

This book will be available in print and in formatted electronic formats from Onyx Neon Press:

http://www.onyxneon.com/

Onyx Neon will relicense the book under a more liberal license upon publication.