Programmer Musings

Review of Randal Schwartz's Perls of Wisdom

Randal Schwartz's Perls of Wisdom
Randal L. Schwartz
Apress, 2005

Randal Schwartz has been writing about Perl since the first edition of the Camel Book. This book collects articles that he has written for a number of magazines into one place, organized (loosely) by topic. These articles span almost a decade of writing on the topic.

In any book by Schwartz, you can expect lots of Perl code, clear explanations, and a bit of humor. In this book, you also get to see how some ideas have evolved over time. Different articles from different time periods on similar topics showing how Schwartz's understanding has changed. He also often provides some insight into why the code is written the way it is or the subtle meaning of some of his idioms.

This is the kind of information that is missing from most books on programming. Why do you choose to write the code this way rather than that way? This book gives you some of that from a veteran in Perl. I've been programming in Perl for over a decade, and I found several tidbits that I either never knew or had forgotten. Schwartz introduced modules that I hadn't used yet, and techniques that I had.

If you are doing any programming in Perl, I would definitely recommend this book very highly.