Perl Best Practices
Aug 10, 2005One of my colleagues mentioned that they had their reviewer copy of Damian Conway’s [Perl Best Practices](http://isbn.nu/0596001738), 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](http://isbn.nu/020161622X) 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](http://isbn.nu/1884777791)) 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.