Effective Perl Programming: Writing Better Programs With Perl - Softcover

Hall, Joseph N.; Schwartz, Randal L.

4.24

113 ratings by Goodreads

9780201419757: Effective Perl Programming: Writing Better Programs With Perl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201419750 ISBN 13: 9780201419757

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 1998

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A hands-on, problem-solving guide to Perl programming explains how to enhance one's profiency in Perl and includes useful examples and code, as well as self-documenting, object-oriented modules available with Perl 5. Original. (Intermediate).

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Review:

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, enigmatic author of Learning Perl, and contributor to Programming 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 monospaced 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.

From the Inside Flap:

I used to write a lot of C and C++. My last major project before stepping into the world of Perl full time was an interpreted language that, among other things, drew diagrams, computed probabilities, and generated entire FrameMaker books. It comprised over 50,000 lines of platform-independent C++, and it had all kinds of interesting internal features. It was a fun project. It also took two years to write.

It seems to me that most interesting projects in C and/or C++ take months or years to complete. But it also seems to me that a whole lot of ideas that start out being mundane and uninteresting become interesting three-month projects when they are expressed in an ordinary high-level language.

This is one of the reasons why I originally became interested in Perl. I had heard that Perl was an excellent scripting language with powerful string handling, regular expression, and process control features. I learned Perl, and learned to like it, when I was thrown into a project in which most of my work involved slinging around text files. I quickly found myself spending hours writing Perl programs that would have taken me days or weeks to write in a different language. Who should read this book

Effective Perl Programming is a book of advice and examples. It derives from my experience as a Perl programmer and--especially--as a Perl instructor. The book is suitable for readers who have a basic understanding of Perl and a few months of practical experience programming in it. Because Effective Perl Programming is a guidebook, not a manual, readers will need access to a comprehensive reference. I recommend either the Perl man pages (freely available in many forms, including Unix man and HTML) or Programming Perl.

Although I use a lot of Unix-derived examples in this book, most of what appears here is not specific to Unix. I thought about including Win32 Perl and MacPerl examples but eventually decided that the book would have more integrity and consistency if it didn't stray from Perl's "native" operating system. I do encourage non-Unix developers to read Effective Perl Programming, or at least to give it a careful look. How and why I wrote this book

I've always wanted to be a writer. In childhood I was obsessed with science fiction. I read constantly, sometimes three paperbacks a day, and every so often, wrote some (bad) stories myself. In 1985, I attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' workshop in East Lansing, Michigan. Afterward, I spent a year or so occasionally working on short story manuscripts, but never published any fiction. (Not yet, anyway!)

Later on, when I had settled down into a career in software, I met Randal Schwartz. I hired him as a contractor on an engineering project and worked with him for over a year. Eventually he left to pursue teaching Perl full time. After a while, so did I.

In May 1996, I had a conversation with Keith Wollman at a developer's conference in San Jose. When we drifted onto the topic of Perl, he asked me what I would think of a book called Effective Perl. I liked the idea. Scott Meyers's Effective C++ was one of my favorite books on C++, and extending the series to cover Perl would obviously be useful. I couldn't get Keith's idea out of my head. With some help from Randal, I worked out a proposal for the book, and Addison-Wesley accepted it.

The rest--well, that was the fun part. I spent many 12-hour days and nights with FrameMaker in front of the computer screen, asked lots of annoying questions on the Perl 5 Porters list, posted many bug reports to the same list, looked through dozens of books and manuals, wrote many, many little snippets of Perl code, and drank many, many cans of Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. I even had an occasional epiphany as I discovered very basic things about Perl I had never realized I was missing. After a while, a manuscript emerged.

This book is my attempt to share with the rest of you some of the fun and stimulation I experienced while learning the power of Perl. I certainly appreciate you taking the time to read it, and I hope you will find it useful and enjoyable.

Joseph N. Hall
Chandler, Arizona 0201419750P04062001

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