Addison-Wesley is ramping up its promotion of Effective Perl Programming, 2nd Edition. They’ll send out several free copies to people who like to review books and tell their friends about it. If you’re interested in getting one of those review copies, send me a note at [email protected]. If I don’t already know you, introduce yourself and send me some links to your previous book reviews, your blog, and so on.
Author: brian d foy
Eliminate needless loops and branching
On Stackoverflow, there’s the question How can I convert a number to its multiple form in Perl?. The best answer for the particular problem is Number::Bytes::Human. Beyond, that, many of the answers take the usual if-elsif-else, such as the one suggested by Michael Cramer: Continue reading “Eliminate needless loops and branching”
Effective Perl Programming at Frozen Perl 2010
On Friday, February 5, 2010 at Frozen Perl, I’m teaching a new master class based on our book, Effective Perl Programming, 2nd Edition. The master class is a low-cost, condensed class format given at a public Perl event. The cost of this one-day class is $100, and there are a limited number of $25 seats for full-time students.
In the one-day class for intermediate Perl programmers, I’ll cover selected topics from the book, including:
- Working with Unicode in Perl
- Tricks with filehandles
- New regex features in Perl 5.10 and later
- Playing with
pack - Using closures to make things simpler
- and other topics as time allows
Although the book hasn’t been published yet, it is available for pre-order on Amazon, and attendees to the class can get a sneak peek at the working manuscript as well as a soft copy of the course slides.
Effective Perl Programming, the blog
Josh McAdams and I recently gave Addison Wesley our final manuscript for Effective Perl Programming, 2nd Edition, an update to Joseph Hall’s excellent first edition published in 1998. Not only have we updated the existing material up to Perl 5.10, but we’ve also quite a bit of new material for the evolution of Perl and its practices in the last 12 years.
We’re not stopping there, though. We had plenty more that we wanted to write and couldn’t fit in the book. Sometimes we had more to say on an item in the book and sometimes we wanted to include a topic that didn’t have the space for it. We will trickle out that extra material here. Additionally, we’d like to keep up a conversation with the readers of the latest edition to refine and expand the material that is already there.
Perl 5.10 new features
Perl 5.10 introduced many new features that had built up over the years. Some of these we covered in the book, but we’ll cover some of those that we neglected. It might take us some time to get around to them all, but we’ll eventually make it. If you want to read about some sooner than others, let us know. Continue reading “Perl 5.10 new features”
Perl 5.8 features
Perl 5.8, mostly a release that improved much of the unseen things in Perl, did have some notable, user-visible features.
- Restricted hashes with Hash::Util (5.8.0)
- Use sitecustomize.pl to affect all programs (5.8.7)
- PerlIO is now the default (5.8.0)