Damian Conway's new book, Perl Best Practices, has been reviewed in the October 2005 issue of Software Development Magazine. A free registration is required to view the full text of the article, but I am probably safe in posting a short excerpt, below.
"Conway, who has won several Larry Wall Awards for his contributions to Perl, opines that as a programmer's style evolves over the years, it may become a force for good. "Or it may lead to a coding style that is nasty, brutish, and underthought. But what it most often leads to is something even worse: Intuitive Programmer Syndrome ... The Intuitive Programmer writes code in a way that feels natural, happens intuitively, and feels good, but doesn't necessarily result in the best code possible." So in place of intuition, Conway offers 256 coding guidelines that 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."
