Book Review: Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway

This is an essential book for both developers and sysadmins who write Perl code to get their job done.

Perl is very powerful language and there are several ways you can code in Perl to get the same results. If you are not careful, you may end-up writing Perl code that is very hard to understand and maintain in a long run.

Perl Best Practices is the only book that explains the best practices you should follow while coding in Perl.

This is not a book that will teach you how to code in Perl. Learning Perl, 5th Edition and Intermediate Perl are excellent books that will teach you how to code in Perl language.

This book with ISBN-10: 0596001738 and ISBN-13: 978-0596001735 was published by O’reilly and has a total of 542 pages.

This book contains following 19 chapters that are well thought-out and essential for anybody who writes Perl program.

1. Best Practices
2. Code Layout
3. Naming Conventions
4. Values and Expressions
5. Variables
6. Control Structures
7. Documentation
8. Built-in Functions
9. Subroutines
10. I/O
11. References
12. Regular Expressions
13. Error Handling
14. Command-Line Processing
15. Objects
16. Class Hierarchies
17. Modules
18. Testing and Debugging
19. Miscellanea

Geek Rating: 5/5 Stars

Perl Best Practices is Highly Recommended. This is not a book that will teach you how to write Perl program. But, this is the only book that will clearly teach you the best practices for Perl programming that is essential for all size of Perl projects.