Effective Perl Programming: Writing Better Programs with Perl

Powerful and flexible, Perl has established itself as a premier programming language, especially as a tool for World Wide Web development, text processing, and system administration. The language features full support for regular expressions, object-oriented modules, network programming, and process management. Perl is extensible and supports modular, cross-platform development.

In Effective Perl Programming, Perl experts Joseph Hall and Randal Schwartz share programming solutions, techniques, pointers, rules of thumb, and the pitfalls to avoid, enabling you to make the most of Perl's power and capabilities.

The authors will help you develop a knack for the right ways to do things. They show you how to solve problems with Perl and how to debug and improve your Perl programs. Offering examples, they help you learn good Perl style. Geared for programmers who have already acquired Perl basics, this book will extend your skill range, providing the tactics and deeper understanding you need to create Perl programs that are more elegant, effective, and succinct. This book also speaks to those who want to become more fluent, expressive, and individualistic Perl programmers.

To help you design and write real-world programs, Effective Perl Programming includes:

• Perl basics
• Idiomatic Perl
• Regular expressions
• Subroutines
• References
• Debugging
• Usage of packages and modules
• Object-oriented programming
• Useful and interesting Perl miscellany

Numerous thought-provoking examples appear throughout the book, highlighting many of the subtleties that make Perl such a fascinating, fun, and powerful language to work with.

Library Journal

Perl is an amazingly powerful language that is especially useful for web work with Common Gateway Interfaces. This is not a book for beginners but for people who have some experience being confused by Perl. Hall discusses namespace, regular expressions, references, packages, and object-oriented programming. The goal of this book is not to write clear, legible, slightly verbose Perl code but "toward something more succinct and individualistic."