Brain Handles

As I noted in my blog entry about the premiere of FunDraw.com, finding help on getting up to speed with ImageMagick was pretty difficult. Most of their on-site documentation is not so much sparse as "minimalist" (i.e. great breadth, really poor depth) and assumes a certain familiarity with both programming and some pretty expert-level graphics terminology.

Now I'd googled around for ImageMagick tutorials and found a cool examples site, but it was all based in how to do the things with the command line tools. Searches for "PerlMagick Tutorials", "PerlMagick Help", and the like tended to be fruitless.

There is a book on ImageMagick using Magick Wand for PHP, but I described the issues with that. The interface was at version 0.18, the developer had gone incommunicado, and it didn't look like anyone else was picking up the torch.

So I started looking for books on doing graphics with Perl. That's where I found
Graphics Programming with Perl. It was a godsend. It went through a large number of various graphics tasks, explaining how to do most of them using both the PerlMagick interface and the GD Graphics library.

Now, having been released in 2002, it's already starting to get out of date. But most of the code samples in it are still effective and great tools for learning. Plus, because he explains some of the terms, the ImageMagick documentation begins to make more sense and become more useful.

I may, in time, write a few simple PerlMagick tutorials and post them to this blog. Since there seems to be a dearth of them online, it would be a public service I could have used. But until then, I just want to recommend again, in a post loaded with phrases like ImageMagick help, PerlMagick help, PerlMagick How To, PerlMagick HowTo, and Perl Magick Tutorial, Graphics Programming with Perl.

It really helped me in a big way, and if you need help getting up to speed on ImageMagick's PerlMagick interface and are having trouble finding good sources of information online like I did, this book is going to help you.