Perl Best Practices
This book offers a collection of 256 guidelines on the art of coding to help you write better Perl code--in fact, the best Perl code you possibly can. The guidelines cover code layout, naming conventions, choice of data and control structures, program decomposition, interface design and implementation, modularity, object orientation, error handling, testing, and debugging. - Publisher
Stats for nerds
22recommend
59mentions
42people
2008–2025years
51% recommend46% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Check out "Perl Best Practices" by Damien Conway, and the more recent "Modern Perl" by Chromatic. Both can be had as paperbacks, and I think both are also available free on online.
- I'll go further. Ignore the Perl specific bits and Conway's "Perl Best Practices" is one of the best general programming books ever written.
It has so many great pieces of advice that apply to any programming task, everything from naming variables, to testing, error handling, code organization, documentation, etc, etc. Ultimately, for timeless advice on programming as a profession the language is immaterial.
- About a dozen years ago, I noticed that the young all seemed to know Python, and did not seem to know Perl. Given that they would be maintaining such code as I wrote and was worth keeping around, I moved to writing in Python. Now when I write Perl, I do silly things like forget semicolons.
Perl can be very well written. I deeply regret not encountering Perl Best Practices when it came out.
- Most of the someone else's I have read has been in stuff from CPAN, and I recall it as pretty good. I have written some pretty bad Perl, and wish that I had encountered the O'Reilly Perl Best Practices long before I did.
- It's an odd critter, but it gets the job done. There are a few pitfalls, such as list flattening, but in my experience, once you are aware of them, they are not hard to avoid.
If you are new to Perl, I highly recommend reading Damien Conway's Perl Best Practices. Even if you end up not picking up all the suggestions, it is worth thinking about them and the problems they try to address.
- Yes, it's a great language for this application.
Make sure you read Damian Conway's book "Perl Best Practices" as a guideline for crafting consistent and readable code. People's biggest gripes about this language generally revolve around poorly written code that is hard to read. Also, when writing regexes it helps to paste one or more example lines or matches above the regex so there is no question about what you are trying to do. 9/10 times I've found debugging SA perl scripts comes down to an unhandled pattern in a regex and this is what helps the most when re-writing it to ensure it doesn't break anything else.
