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Perl Best Practices
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Review
"If you are looking for a book to teach you how to program Perl, this is definitely not what you need. Also, if you are cranking out quick Perl scripts to solve one-time tasks, it might not be worth the effort to read this book. However, if you are fairly comfortable with the language and are looking for ways to improve your code, this book would be a wonderful addition to your bookshelf." - James Mohr, Linux Magazine, November 2005
About the Author
Damian Conway holds a PhD in Computer Science and is an honorary Associate Professor with the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
Currently he runs an international IT training company--Thoughtstream--which provides programmer development from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.
Damian was the winner of the 1998, 1999, and 2000 Larry Wall Awards for Practical Utility. The best technical paper at the annual Perl Conference was subsequently named in his honour. He is a member of the technical committee for The Perl Conference, a keynote speaker at many Open Source conferences, a former columnist for The Perl Journal, and author of the book Object Oriented Perl. In 2001 Damian received the first "Perl Foundation Development Grant" and spent 20 months working on projects for the betterment of Perl.
A popular speaker and trainer, he is also the author of numerous well-known Perl modules, including Parse::RecDescent (a sophisticated parsing tool), Class::Contract (design-by-contract programming in Perl), Lingua::EN::Inflect (rule-based English transformations for text generation), Class::Multimethods (multiple dispatch polymorphism), Text::Autoformat (intelligent automatic reformatting of plaintext), Switch (Perl's missing case statement), NEXT (resumptive method dispatch), Filter::Simple (Perl-based source code manipulation), Quantum::Superpositions (auto-parallelization of serial code using a quantum mechanical metaphor), and Lingua::Romana::Perligata (programming in Latin).
Most of his time is now spent working with Larry Wall on the design of the new Perl 6 programming language.
12/09/2006
This is a must-read for any Perl programmer. You are only as good as the teachers you have, and if your teachers use stuff like $|++, you are screwed. In this case, Conway would tell you to Use English;, and then you'd know what a $| is. A sampling of other tips:
Don't modify via $_ (too easy to screw things up)
Use hashes for arguments if arguments > 3 (trackability)
Use Croak instead of die (Croak gives more info, better for debugging)
Use ' ' instead of " " when no interpolation (less ambiguity)
Don't use unless (complication and confusion).
use /xms in regexes (for readability, and avoiding mistakes)
test when closing or opening a file
A few of the reviews here are 1 star. IMO these are people to which "freedom" is more important than "group code maintainability". This should really be the third Perl book for anybody, after Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl.
For those wanting to test their code against this book, there is a Perl Module, Perl::Critic, that does the job.
03/08/2005
What a great book. If you have experience programming in Perl you will truely appreciate the hard won insights of the author. As I read through the author's tips and guidelines for Perl programming I would constantly find myself thinking 'what a great idea' or 'why didn't I think of that'. We are always told in programming 'don't reinvent the wheel', as advice to find code already written to solve our problem. Well, with this book you can do something just as good regarding the learning process of Perl programming. Following the author's guidelines will save you countless hours by making you a better Perl programmer. I wish I had this book about 5 years ago, it would have improved my Perl programming ten fold. Better late than never.
02/08/2005
I love this book, and I'm impressed with the guts it took to write it. Perl is a "there are many ways to do it" language, and Perl programmers are adamant about finding clever solutions in the language. This book sets down a set of guidelines for the most professional way to do it. And in so doing pays Perl a lot more respect than it's paid in other books.
I strongly recommend that anyone writing Perl professionally should read this. But I do have an issue or two with it. For example, I think it was wrong to start off with a rule about brackets. That's one thing that people are religious about and there is no real reason to go one way or another. That starts the book on a weak premise. From which it quickly recovers.
Overall, a fantastic book. Well written and researched. It's the kind of book I would expect from Damian Conway and I wasn't let down. A must-read for Perl programmers.
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