Programming Perl Programming Perl review

Overview

I found this book in the trash from a house near my apartment, I picked it up thinking it had some value to me but I found it hard to read at first. I tried reading it but I put it down after the first chapters, it’s only after a revived interest in Perl that I’ve read it again.

It’s rather nice that Larry Wall himself would take part in this collaborative effort. I have to admire the devotion from the creator of Perl himself and who better explain the intricacies of the language than him?

Content

Perl isn’t going anywhere but the language is undeniably on the decline and outside of the occasional shell script for system administration or hacking a quick command line utility, I will probably never have to work or maintain a large Perl project in my lifetime.

Perl has missed the OOP boat by a long shot, like PHP’s OOP, it’s an afterthought and harder to deal with than the latter but the topic is not even decently covered in the book.

I’m not sure if the book is a reference, a cookbook or a manual but it seemed rather disorganized, covering a wide range of topics in a zig zag pattern.

One of its strong points is how it tries to address the idiosyncrasies of Perl and what makes it special.

TMTOWTDI is probably what I appreciate the most in Perl world and this book doesn’t disappoint for a second in that regard. That being said, it also shows that the obvious way to do things in a classic manner™ is often the longest way to achieve an objective in Perl. If there’s one things this book accomplishes brilliantly, it’s starting to make you think in Perl.

The information presented is often very dense, the cryptic nature of Perl probably doesn’t help and I’m not even sure that I’m able to fully appreciate this book at the moment.

It’s often true that easy things are easy in Perl. Compared to other languages there’s little boilerplate but hard things also seem hard to accomplish. I’m guessing that reading this book and coding in Perl is like learning to play the piano, you have to stick to it for years before it finally pays off.

The part I appreciated the most, what the bridge between perl and system administration because that’s what’s most relevant to me since my beginning with Perl.

Verdict

I think Programming Perl is a great addition to Learning perl and the two together are probably must haves for a Perl programmer. That being said, I will probably not read it again unless I have to work with Perl on a daily basis.