Perl Medic

What Hacker News says

1. petesergeantApr 2022
   To my mind, Perl Medic by Peter Scott is the best book I've ever read on refactoring and working with legacy code
   thread
2. peteretepFeb 2018
   Perl Medic is a phenomenal book about refactoring in the general case, through the lens of Perl
   thread
3. hercyniumOct 2011
   Two excellent books I can recommend for someone working with legacy Perl:

   Perl Medic (Peter J. Scott) - http://amzn.com/0201795264 Effective Perl Programming (Joseph N. Hall, Joshua A. McAdams, brian d foy) - http://amzn.com/0321496949

   Besides those, having a good reference to the language is also essential. For example, I keep Perl In a Nutshell close by, even though I almost always just search http://perldoc.perl.org/ when I need that info.

   Show morethread
4. hercyniumJun 2011
   re: Perl Medic... Excellent book. What I learned there has served me very well with Perl, and also helped me with work on some crufty Python as well!

   Also, yeah... I should take-back the TDD comment, or at least re-word it. I just get a little knee-jerky when I hear the word TDD mindlessly spouted out as a panacea. TDD works best when combined with other best-practices, and of course, learning how to write tests that help and don't become yet another ball of mud is an art in itself!

   Show morethread
5. dragonquestApr 2011
   Its so pleasant to find such resources spreading throughout the community. Perl is one language which could've died easily given its undeserved write-only reputation, but its thriving and making some very cool new stuff while steadily negating the argument of being line-noise (Dancer comes to mind as an excellent project to both read and use).

   While Modern Perl and Perl Best Practices seem to be now the defacto texts to follow in this field, I highly suggest to also supplement your learning of good Perl by reading Perl Medic by Peter Scott. While its main purpose is how to maintain a legacy codebase, its an absolute gem when it comes to what type of Perl code you should be churning out.

   Show morethread