Effective Perl Programming: 60 Methods and Rules for Scripting Better Programs (A-W Developers Press)
Effective Perl Programming: 60 Methods and Rules for Scripting Better Programs (A-W Developers Press) by Joseph N. Hall and Randal Schwartz
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Number of Pages:
- 288
- ISBN:
- 0201419750
- Product Group:
- book
- Publisher:
- Addison Wesley
- Publication Date:
- Feb. 11, 1998
- BooksForGeeks.com ID:
- 1420
Effective Perl Programming is a gem of a Perl book. Its author, Joseph Hall, is a well-known Perl instructor and frequent poster on the seminal comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup. The book's technical editor is none other than Randal Schwartz, noted Net personality and enigmatic author of Learning Perl.
Hall has distilled his years of Perl experience into a book for Perl programmers that is both fluid and fun to read. It's somewhat like reading the Perl FAQ; even when you think you know everything, there's so much you don't know.
Effective Perl Programming has a clear layout: the text is easy on the eyes and the mono-spaced font makes a clear distinction between backticks and single quotes. Hall uses his PEGS (Perl Graphical Structures) notation to show the difference between Perl's different types of data structures and how everything ties together.
Packed with great examples and code snippets, this book is an excellent source of tips and tricks to make your Perl programs faster and easier to read. You'll also find a strong section on using the Perl debugger to improve your Perl programming skills. In yet another section, Hall walks the reader through the creation of a complete XS module that can boost the performance of array shuffling eight-fold. All in all, this is a great book for programmers who want to move beyond plain, verbose Perl toward a more succinct and powerful coding style. --Jake Bond
Reviews for Effective Perl Programming: 60 Methods and Rules for Scripting Better Programs (A-W Developers Press)
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A fast track to idiomatic Perl
Rated out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2007
This is a good book for getting a handle on intermediate level Perl and its idiomatic uses, arranged as a series of 60 'items' -- the debt to Effective C++ is obvious. This is not a tutorial on Perl, you should at least be at the level of The Llama and ideally be somewhat acquainted with the material covered in The Alpaca, too. Although similar ground is covered in this book to the latter, I would treat this book as a way to shore up your previous knowledge, rather than learning it for the first time.
The content holds up surprisingly well for 1997. The opening chapters cover a lot of the oddities and gotchas of life with Perl, such as slicing, the various connotations of undef, a persuasive defence of $_ and where + is necessary to disambiguate. The final 'miscellany' chapter also contains useful information in a similar vein. And this also appears to be one of the first books to detail the now famous Schwartzian transform and the Orcish manoeuvre for sorting, so it has a certain historical appeal.
Equally, the chapters on debugging, references, regular expressions and object oriented programming are also pretty good. It's just that there are now several other books that cover these topics. If you only want one book in this style, Perl Best Practices bestrides the field like a colossus, being more comprehensive, and better written. Not that there's anything wrong with the writing here, it's never boring as such, but it does feel flat.
Nonetheless, Effective Perl Programming does the job it sets out to do fairly well, and I find you can never have too much help in explaining the nooks and crannies of idiomatic Perl, so this is still worth getting hold of, particularly because you can find it at an extremely reasonable price. -
Stunning
Rated out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2000
This book will alow you to make the transition from a fluent Perl speaker into a true poet! .. the knowledge in this book is more than plain hard facts. iit contains the essential guides to style and composition that make the difference between a " working" perl programme and a carfully crafted masterpiece. Yes .. theres "more than one way to do it" .. but it somtime nice to do it the elegant way! -
Outstanding!
Rated out of 5 stars, July 12th, 1999
Precise and concise. Well written. Useful itemized table of content. Packed with excellent examples of do's and dont's. Indispensable. Recommended for all serious Perl programmers. -
code with style . . .
Rated out of 5 stars, June 12th, 1999
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. -
Recommended reading for every perl programmer
Rated out of 5 stars, May 12th, 1999
Superb book for anybody interested in improving the quality of their code. The discussions and examples are clear and I cannot wait for the next book by this author.