This book states its purpose as a guide for programmers
who “inherited” legacy Perl code from other people. In
fact, it’s just a “best practices in Perl” book in disguise, which is very good, since I haven’t read another such book with Perl specifically in mind.
There are “best practices” books for many languages, and
quite a few non-language-specific books, but a Perl one was
certainly missing.

The book is short and is written in a light and talkative
style, which makes is easy and very quick to read. The author
also includes many code samples with a clear hands-on approach,
which is something I like about technical books.

There are many good and interesting bits of information in the
“Perl Medic”. I especially liked the discussion of testing with
the Test:: modules – though intended strictly for Perl, I feel
this is the best treatment of the subject of testing I’ve ever
read. There are also a lot of discussion about some of the more
arcane features of Perl which are nice to keep in mind. Throughout
the book the author also presents many useful CPAN modules for
various tasks and discusses when it’s appropriate to use each.

All in all, a very nice Perl book for readers well past the
Learning+Camel+Cookbook stage. Reading this book can definitely
bring you a step higher in your Perl expertise, which is a very
nice return for the 4-5 hours you’ll spend reading it.

Related posts:

1. Book review: “Perl best practices” by Damian Conway
2. numeric perl ?
3. rant about weather and perl
4. using PAR to create a custom “hosted” Perl environment
5. Book review: “Effective Perl” by J.N. Hall and R. Schwartz

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 3rd, 2005 at 14:37 and is filed under Book reviews, Perl. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.