Book 5/50 – 'Perl Best Practices'

Yet another book stumbled upon accidentally in the library. I had seen reviews of Perl Best Practices on the internet, but never bothered to go and find a copy.

Damian Conway has a humourous but readable style – the joking footnotes throughout the text are typical of O’Reilly. The book breaks down into short sections, each with a heading giving a piece of advice, followed a short discussion with some code examples. Related topics are grouped together, so you can follow the movement from basic syntax to broader coding styles. Particularly interesting was the treatment of ‘inside-out objects’ – an alternate method of object-orientation in Perl, that offers greater encapsulation than the traditional hashref-based object style.

I didn’t agree with every last detail of how Damian says you should lay out code – perhaps it is more important to maintain consistency within a team or project. Still, every Perl programmer will be able to take something away from this book, which is packed full of new ideas. It should be essential reading for anyone writing Perl in a team.

: 06 Feb 2007 20:27 |  Tags: Book Fifty Books Perl Review |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem