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One of my colleagues mentioned that they had their reviewer copy of Damian Conway’s Perl Best Practices, that several other colleagues had contributed, that it was damn good and that it should be company policy to have everyone read it before writing a line of code. Not many technical books get that kind of rave (Hunt and Thomas’s The Pragmatic Programmer is another, if you code and don’t have it, get it) so I preordered.

I’m glad I did. I’ve been understandably busy but I read through it, made my notes, updated my environment and began adopting the advice. It is every bit as good as expected and immediately useful. I was particularly struck by the refinements on building “inside-out” classes (a trick I was exposed to in one of Damian’s courses and similar to the Flyweight pattern in his book Object Oriented Perl) but it’s full of simple and pointedly obvious tips like using the modules List::Utils, List::MoreUtils and Fatal and applying Regexp::Common instead of rolling your own. Not all the advice is easy to accept, and I admit to taking it piecemeal, but it’s a great book.

A well-respected programmer, seeing that his employer was engaging in behavior that was unethical and in some jurisdictions illegal, sent a lengthy letter distancing himself from their activity and stating that he cannot continue their relationship and may contact the authorities. Their reaction was unsurprising.

Here’s the link: Health Market Science is evil