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… Read More »
Perl Best Practices Damian Conway O’Reilly, 2005 This book is hard to summarize. There is much good advice in this book. Unfortunately, there’s also some advice that I found questionable. Conway covers some of important Perl programming and general programming best practices, including consistent formatting, use of strict and warnings, and the use of version… Read More »
Perl Testing: A Developer’s Notebook Ian Langworth and chromatic O’Reilly, 2005 This is the first book I have read from the new O’Reilly Developer’s Notebook series. Although the style of these books probably won’t work for every topic, it works particularly well for a book on testing. Each chapter is organized as a set of… Read More »
Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5 Scott Waters Apress, 2005 I had mixed feelings about reading this book caused by my current views of Perl 6. Some of what I have heard about Perl 6 is exciting and I really can’t wait. Other things I have heard fill me with dread.… Read More »
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… Read More »
In The Semantics of Garbage Collection, I explained why I don’t like the term garbage collection. I also introduced the term resource recovery, and suggested that this change in naming could generate a useful change in viewpoint. Many programmers have been indoctrinated with the belief that garbage collection is the solution to all memory problems,… Read More »
I just recently read Valueless Software, written by Chad Fowler from about a year ago. In this article, he describes an approach to practicing music by ignoring the result and focusing on the process. He contends that software people might benefit from a similar approach. I have actually seen this approach used before in C… Read More »
Perl for Web Site Management John Callender O’Reilly, 2002 This book may be one of the best books I’ve ever seen for getting the Perl programming language used in a place where it is sorely needed. Many people developing web-based applications are not programmers. They learned to use some HTML authoring tool and progressed from… Read More »
Mastering Regular Expressions Jeffery E. F. Friedl O’Reilly, 1997 If you use regular expressions on a regular basis, or if you’ve used them a little but want to get better, this is a book you need. I had been working with regular expressions for over ten years when I first read this book. I was… Read More »
I was doing a little research on the Java JUnit test framework and ran across the article The Third State of your Binary JUnit Tests. The author points out that in many test sets there are ignored tests as well as the passing and failing tests. As the author says, you may want to ignore… Read More »