Perl Medic

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Language: English
ISBN: 0201795264
Paperback: 336 pages

 

Description: Perl ranks among hackers' favorite languages--there's always another approach to a problem, always optimization to be done, and forever new techniques to try. Perl's a hoot. But the culture of tinkering that surrounds Perl has resulted in a large body of hard-to-understand legacy code. That legacy code has to be maintained, extended, and adapted to new conditions--often without the help of the person who originally created it. Perl Medic considers Perl from the perspective of a programmer looking at code written by someone else and trying to answer the ancient question: "What were they thinking?"

 

It's a creative approach, and one that makes good reading for someone well-versed in Perl programming (author Peter Scott makes the analogy of becoming fluent in a human language, such as French, then studying its various accents and dialects). He shows, for example, a kludgy piece of code that's meant to catch CGI form uploads, then indicates that the obvious replacement is the CGI.pm module. Elsewhere, Scott shows why symbolic references are bad, and how to avoid them by means of hashes. Some of the value in this book is in the form of documentation of the differences among Perl versions; other useful coverage deals with warnings and strictness control as debugging tools. Read this straight through to improve your own code; use the index to help decipher and improve what someone else has written.