Programmer Musings

Review of Perl Hacks

Perl Hacks
chromatic , Damian Conway, Curtis "Ovid" Poe
O'Reilly, 2006

When I first saw the title Perl Hacks, I was a little unclear what the book would cover. After all, the Perl Cookbook has recipes that span the spectrum from basic to advanced. What would Perl Hacks supply that wouldn't be found elsewhere?

The first few hacks answered those doubts superbly. The first 11 hacks focus on productivity in programming Perl. The first hack shows how to use Firefox shortcuts to make finding Perl module documentation easier. The next couple of hacks focus on getting more out of the Perl Docs. The section continues with ideas for using shell aliases, configuring Vim and Emacs for Perl, enforcing local style with Perl::Tidy, and running Perl tests within your editor. Although I had stumbled into a few of these or seen some of them elsewhere, these hacks were focused specifically on making you more productive, immediately.

The next few sections focus more on programming in Perl, including user interface issues, data manipulation, and module usage. The section on debugging covers several useful techniques. Some apply to any programming problem (binary searching for bugs), others are Perl specific (customizing the Perl debugger). The Developer Tricks and Know Thy Code sections will probably improve your Perl knowledge and skills in a number of ways.

The final section of the book should really push your Perl programming knowledge and skills. Most of the hacks in this section are pretty advanced. You may never need some of what is shown here. On the other hand, one of these hacks may be just the thing you need to solve the problem you are currently struggling with.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by Perl Hacks. Given the authors, I expected the book to cover interesting topics very well. I was initially concerned that the book might just be a rehash of information from other books, but that concern was quickly laid to rest. You may not learn something from every hack, but I'm confident that almost everyone will find something new in this book.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone programming in Perl, whether novice, expert, or anywhere in between.