Item Description:

Review Synopsis:

Title: Effective Perl Programming: Writing Better Programs with Perl
Authors: Joseph N. Hall & Randal L. Schwartz
Publisher: Addison Wesley, 1997
ISBN: 0-20141-975-0

Capsule Review

Rating: 4/5

Who would be interested in this book?

• Beginning or intermediate programmers looking to pick up some helpful tips
• Anyone who wants to improve their PERL style

Full Review

Disclaimer: I'm only an intermediate grade PH, not super advanced or hardcore...so please keep that in mind. =)

I found this book very helpful when it came to little tricks of style and efficiency. It reminds me a lot of Meyers' books "Effective C++" and "More Effective C++" in the size of the tips included. It's difficult to write a long review for a pretty short book, which is structured into small, bite-sized pieces, so I'll keep this short

The book is segmented into groups of tips, from regular expressions to references, from proper idiomatic PERL to packages, modules, and OO PERL. The snippets of code have often given me good insights into ways I can better solve the problems I face at work. The regexp section resulted in a dramatic improvement in an application I had to modify...people were quite impressed. For those of us who haven't the time to read lots and lots of docs to learn all the ins and outs of regexps and data structures, this book gives good insight into what you may know already, but not have entirely thought through to how it may be applied to good coding.

This book is not an essential piece of a PERL library, but for those of us who are still learning new things every time we sit down and start typing, it offers a wealth of advice, which can save a lot of time, trouble, and wasted code. I would highly recommend that beginning PERL programmers at least find a friend's copy and read it through once or twice. It is very well-written--clear and concise, technical but not overly so.