Perl Hacks

Perl Hacks
chromatic, Damian Conway, Curtis "Ovid" Poe
O'Reilly Media, 2006
ISBN 0-596-52674-1
US$ 29.99

Rating: 4/5 (very good)

Lately I've been focusing on improving the way I write Perl code (which really needed to be improved). When you just think about what you have to do, and not how you do it, you usually end up with ugly and unreadable programs which actually do what you want; the problem arises when maintaing them. Also, knowing a bit more regarding the language you use allows you to save a lot of time and lines of code.

Perl Best Practices and Higher Order Perl, two books I read in recent times, helped me a lot in this direction, even though from different points of view: the first one targets at improving code, the second one at improving the way you think when you write code.

Perl Hacks can be regarded as an addition to the above mentioned books, forming a trinity which helps the programmer to actually code better. The point of view of Perl Hacks is, however, different from the one of both the other two books.

Perl Hacks teaches, as the subtitle aptly explains, tips & tools for programming, debugging, and surviving. This means a lot of things: from hints on how to use editors to suggestions on how to better search through Perl documentation, from how to make proper use of inside-out objects to how to debug your programs without wasting precious time.

The information is organized in 101 hacks, which feature a quite detailed explanation of each topic: an overview of the hack; example code (if applicable) on how to run it; suggestions on how to further improve the hack. This is quite useful, as every hack becomes not only a nice suggestion, but a starting point for digging deeper into a topic, and therefore learning something new about Perl.

All in all, even if this book is not a must-have like Perl Best Practices, it proves to be handy: browsing through it will surely show you something you didn't know of before, should it be a coding trick or just a way to enhance your programming experience.