Powerful and flexible, Perl has established itself as a premier programming language, especially as a tool for World Wide Web development, text processing, and system administration. The language features full support for regular expressions, object-oriented modules, network programming, and process management. Perl is extensible and supports modular, cross-platform development.

In Effective Perl Programming, Perl experts Joseph Hall and Randal Schwartz share programming solutions, techniques, pointers, rules of thumb, and the pitfalls to avoid, enabling you to make the most of Perl's power and capabilities.

The authors will help you develop a knack for the right ways to do things. They show you how to solve problems with Perl and how to debug and improve your Perl programs. Offering examples, they help you learn good Perl style. Geared for programmers who have already acquired Perl basics, this book will extend your skill range, providing the tactics and deeper understanding you need to create Perl programs that are more elegant, effective, and succinct. This book also speaks to those who want to become more fluent, expressive, and individualistic Perl programmers.

To help you design and write real-world programs, Effective Perl Programming includes:

• Perl basics

• Idiomatic Perl

• Regular expressions

• Subroutines

• References

• Debugging

• Usage of packages and modules

• Object-oriented programming

• Useful and interesting Perl miscellany

Numerous thought-provoking examples appear throughout the book, highlighting many of the subtleties that make Perl such a fascinating, fun, and powerful language to work with.

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Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 46 Ratings

A fast track to idiomatic Perl - 2007-07-16
Reviewer Rating:
This is a good book for getting a handle on intermediate level Perl and its idiomatic uses, arranged as a series of 60 'items' -- the debt to Effective C++ is obvious. This is not a tutorial on Perl, you should at least be at the level of The Llama and ideally be somewhat acquainted with the material covered in The Alpaca, too. Although similar ground is covered in this book to the latter, I would treat this book as a way to shore up your previous knowledge, rather than learning it for the first time.

The content holds up surprisingly well for 1997. The opening chapters cover a lot of the oddities and gotchas of life with Perl, such as slicing, the various connotations of undef, a persuasive defence of $_ and where + is necessary to disambiguate. The final 'miscellany' chapter also contains useful information in a similar vein. And this also appears to be one of the first books to detail the now famous Schwartzian transform and the Orcish manoeuvre for sorting, so it has a certain historical appeal.

Equally, the chapters on debugging, references, regular expressions and object oriented programming are also pretty good. It's just that there are now several other books that cover these topics. If you only want one book in this style, Perl Best Practices bestrides the field like a colossus, being more comprehensive, and better written. Not that there's anything wrong with the writing here, it's never boring as such, but it does feel flat.

Nonetheless, Effective Perl Programming does the job it sets out to do fairly well, and I find you can never have too much help in explaining the nooks and crannies of idiomatic Perl, so this is still worth getting hold of, particularly because you can find it at an extremely reasonable price.

Right ways to write Perl - 2008-11-15
Reviewer Rating:
A language reference book that's a page-turner? Yes, it can happen, and Hall and Schwartz have done it. At least one right way to almost anything in Perl that you might want to do, and then some. Clear, concise, no-nonsense guidance and explanations. What else can I say -- I wish I had a book like this for C!

great book - 2008-06-21
Reviewer Rating:
this book is "MUST HAVE" Perl book!
It gives you great idea to simply your code and algorithm.

Terrific Book - 2007-02-25
Reviewer Rating:
I'm fairly new to Perl (but not to programming) and this book is great. I really like the format of the code examples, and there's a lot of wisdom here on writing good, idiomatic Perl.

Great Perl Book - 2007-02-06
Reviewer Rating:
This book shows you some efficient and interesting ways of using Perl. It is very informative and I often use it when I want to see if there is a better way of doing something.

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