Effective Perl Programming

**** Effective Perl Programming: Writing Better Programs With Perl -- Several chapters are available electronically

Joseph N. Hall, Randal L. Schwartz / Paperback / Published 1998

Paperback - 288 pages 1st edition (January 1998)
Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201419750 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.63 x 9.17 x 7.34
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 3,991
Avg. Customer Review: *****
Number of Reviews: 10

A useful intermediate to advanced level book on Perl. Explains a lot of idioms and pitfalls of the language. Not all recommendations should be taken for granted. Highly recommended as a second book on Perl. I prefer it to the Cookbook, but you is involved with the language on daily basis you probably should think about buying both.  Like Tom Christiansen this guy is obsessed with finding shortcuts in Perl, but if you ignore this perversion the book is pretty much OK.

 

The author cares about his book. The Joseph Hall's website http://www.effectiveperl.com/   contains some chapters in PDF format. I also like his growing Perl Recipes area. In general the quality of the web site distinguish this book from others even more.

 

Like Scott Meyers' Effective C++, on which it is modeled, Joseph Hall's Effective Perl Programming is not for the novices. In some way it demonstrates Perl design flaws. Text contain 60 topics (called items), grouped into 10 sections, that illuminate difficult parts of the language. For example assigning undef to an array creates an array with one element -- uninitialized arrays in Perl have value (), the empty list. Sometimes show useful idioms like ($i, $j)=($j, $i) for exchanging two elements.  It also includes several tips on using the debugger effectively and submitting modules to the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (http://www.perl.org/CPAN/).

Here is one amazon.com review:

A reader from Seattle, WA , June 30, 1999 *****
code with style . . .
One beauty of perl is that there are so many ways to do any given task. This can also make life hell when you have to maintain other people's code, or even your own code several months later. While this book doesn't tell you 'one right way' to do things, it does show you how to do things with style. Not only will you feel cool for writing pretty code, you'll be much happier with it in the long run.

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