Perl Developer's Guide (Application Development) Book

While O'Reilly's Programming Perl is the definitive reference it also reflects Perl author Larry Wall's sideways approach to life. The Perl Developer's Guide is more mainstream with the emphasis on learning how to make Perl work for you. The book assumes only a passing familiarity with programming and is platform agnostic, covering methods of installing, writing and running Perl programs under a variety of operating systems. There are few "correct" ways to build or even run a Perl program. With every feature introduced the authors demonstrate alternative usage approaches before sticking their necks out to recommend a "best" solution. This familiarity with different ways to write programs helps enormously when looking at existing code but can be exhausting to read about, even with many examples and diagrams to help. One of Perl's strengths, apart from being able to do just about anything with anything on any platform, is regular expressions--which can be confusing. The authors acknowledge the problem with this mind-numbing example: $line =~ m"subs+(w+)s+s*(?=sub)"s;. As usual, they then supply a fix, in this case with the x operator, which enables white space in Perl regular expressions to aid readability. Nowhere is this approach more effective than in the section on turning old code into object code. The section on debugging Perl is extremely thorough, with usage examples of carp(), cluck(), croak() and confess() as well as discussion on debugging larger Perl projects using exception handling. To get the most out of the Perl Developer's Guide you really need to work through it, which is the only downside. It will consume a lot of rainy Sunday afternoons. On the other hand, you'll be an impressive Perl programmer. --Steve PatientRead More