Perl Best Practices: Standards and Styles for Developing Maintainable Code

Damian Conway

Jul 2005 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

Many programmers code by instinct, relying on convenient habits or a "style" they picked up early on. They aren't conscious of all the choices they make, like how they format their source, the names they use for variables, or the kinds of loops they use. They're focused entirely on problems they're solving, solutions they're creating, and algorithms they're implementing. So they write code in the way that seems natural, that happens intuitively, and that feels good.

But if you're serious about your profession, intuition isn't enough. Perl Best Practices author Damian Conway explains that rules, conventions, standards, and practices not only help programmers communicate and coordinate with one another, they also provide a reliable framework for thinking about problems, and a common language for expressing solutions. This is especially critical in Perl, because the language is designed to offer many ways to accomplish the same task, and consequently it supports many incompatible dialects.

With a good dose of Aussie humor, Dr. Conway (familiar to many in the Perl community) offers 256 guidelines on the art of coding to help you write better Perl code--in fact, the best Perl code you possibly can. The guidelines cover code layout, naming conventions, choice of data and control structures, program decomposition, interface design and implementation, modularity, object orientation, error handling, testing, and debugging.

They're designed to work together to produce code that is clear, robust, efficient, maintainable, and concise, but Dr. Conway doesn't pretend that this is the one true universal and unequivocal set of best practices. Instead, Perl Best Practices offers coherent and widely applicable suggestions based on real-world experience of how code is actually written, rather than on someone's ivory-tower theories on howsoftware ought to be created.

Most of all, Perl Best Practices offers guidelines that actually work, and that many developers around the world are already using. Much like Perl itself, these guidelines are about helping you to get your job done, without getting in the way.

Praise for Perl Best Practices from Perl community members:

"As a manager of a large Perl project, I'd ensure that every member of my team has a copy of Perl Best Practices on their desk, and use it as the basis for an in-house style guide."-- Randal Schwartz

"There are no more excuses for writing bad Perl programs. All levels of Perl programmer will be more productive after reading this book."-- Peter Scott

"Perl Best Practices will be the next big important book in the evolution of Perl. The ideas and practices Damian lays down will help bring Perl out from under the embarrassing heading of "scripting languages". Many of us have known Perl is a real programming language, worthy of all the tasks normally delegated to Java and C++. With Perl Best Practices, Damian shows specifically how and why, so everyone else can see, too."-- Andy Lester

"Damian's done what many thought impossible: show how to build large, maintainable Perl applications, while still letting Perl be the powerful, expressive language that programmers have loved for years."-- Bill Odom

"Finally, a means to bring lasting order to the process and product of real Perl development teams."-- Andrew Sundstrom

"Perl Best Practices provides a valuable education in how to write robust, maintainable Perl, and is a definitive citation source when coaching other programmers."-- Bennett Todd"I've been teaching Perl for years, and find the same question keeps being asked: Where can I find a reference for writing reusable, maintainable Perl code? Finally I have a decent answer."-- Paul Fenwick"At last a well researched, well thought-out, comprehensive guide to Perl style. Instead of each of us developing our own, we can learn good practices from one of Perl's most prolific and experienced authors. I recommend this book to anyone who prefers getting on with the job rather than going back and fixing errors caused by syntax and poor style issues."-- Jacinta Richardson"If you care about programming in any language read this book. Even if you don't intend to follow all of the practices, thinking through your style will improve it."-- Steven Lembark"The Perl community's best author is back with another outstanding book. There has never been a comprehensive reference on high quality Perl coding and style until Perl Best Practices. This book fills a large gap in every Perl bookshelf."-- Uri Guttman

Ratings and reviews

Please note: this review is not about the book itself. It's about the way it has been converted into google books format. This book talks about importance of code style. It talks a lot about indentation, placement of operators and brackets. After all, it's supposed to help you develop consistent and readable code style. Now, all those good intentions will not help you one bit. Why? Because in practically each example of "GOOD" code (the ones in bold) last line has not been placed on it's own line, where it should be. When I read first example (Kernighan & Ritchie bracketing) I thought that there are a lot of thing I do not know and it's probably one of them. When I read second one, I did not notice (since it was just bracket that stuck to the previous line. When I came to heredocs section, I got really, really, annoyed. What's the point? Here I read the text describing one thing, and here I see an example that does not live up to the described standards. I tried three different platforms - Unix, Android and Windows. I tried different browsers too. No matter what I try , I still see grossly misformatted examples of code that are supposed to teach me otherwise.

Good book that's full of useful advice and tips. It's a great starting point for a company-wide Perl coding standard, but not all of its advice it going to fit. Some doesn't even make a lot of sense or just doesn't look right. Multi-line ternary operations, anyone? Other than coding standards though, the book is a gem for presenting some neat tricks hidden in plain view within the language. These tips are generally situational, but can be very helpful and are always presented in clean, well-structured code.

After being productive in Perl, this book brought some much needed finesse to my work. My code is now cleaner, easier to understand, and less error prone. The book is very well written, succinct, and obviously written by someone with a sharp mind and the English skills to communicate his knowledge and opinions.