Author: brian d foy

A Chinese translation of Effective Perl Programming is in the works

There’s a Chinese translation of _Effective Perl Programming_ in the works. I don’t know when it will be available: the translation will take some time, then the publisher has to put it on paper, then it has to show up in stores. I don’t have any details on where or how you can buy the translation. If you know those, please let us know and we’ll post the details here (even using your referral link).

However, if you’re reading this directly, the Chinese edition might not matter to you. :)

If you know about any other translations, tell us about those too. Often the author doesn’t find out about them until they get a copy, if they ever get a copy.

Perl 5.12 new features

Perl 5.12.1 is out, which is the sign that it’s time for normal users to pay attention to it: that first point release should have sanded down all the rough edges. As usual, the complete list of major changes is in the perldelta5.12.0 documentation, we’ll cover some more of the interesting features in The Effective Perler in the coming weeks. Our initial list of user-interesting features include: Continue reading “Perl 5.12 new features”

Compare dates as strings when you can.

Just because you find a module that does something doesn’t mean that you have to use it. There are many excellent date and time modules on CPAN, including most people’s favorite, DateTime. In your heady rush for program purity and elegance, don’t think that you always have to use objects to do your work. Sometimes the overhead of objects, which have to call (perhaps many) subroutines to do their work, is too expensive. Continue reading “Compare dates as strings when you can.”

Effective Perl free sample chapter: Files and Filehandles

Addison-Wesley converted our chapter on “Files and Filehandles” to HTML and put it online for as a free sample chapter. I selected this chapter as the free sample because it was the most fun to write but also the most valuable to new Perl programmers. Filehandles are the way you interact with the world, and using them wisely can give your program quite a bit of flexibility and make many tasks much easier.

Here’s the list of Items from that chapter, each of which you can read for free online:

We’ve also added more Items for “Files and Filehandles” in this blog, which you can also read for free. However, don’t forget about that Donate button on the right had side of the page if you find this site valuable. Or, buy our book and encourage all your friends to buy our book. Donations and book sales give us a little motivational boost to keep going. :)

Know what your the last evaluated expression actually is.

In Perl, a subroutine or other block structure that returns a value gives back the last evaluated expression, but if you’re not careful you might not recognize what that last evaluation actually is. It’s not necessarily the last statement in the block; it’s just the last one that you actually execute. For this Item, forget about the best practice of using explicit returns. You should do that for precisely the reasons you will see here, but you can’t learn about the problem by avoiding it. Continue reading “Know what your the last evaluated expression actually is.”

Effective Perl Programming’s table of contents

Here is the final table of contents for Effective Perl Programming, 2nd Edition. The “Item” references in our blog entries refer to the items in the book. We also have a map from the Item numbers in the first edition to those in the second, but we’ll have to do a little work to make those look nice for the blog. Continue reading “Effective Perl Programming’s table of contents”