Apart from the dubious educational value of one-liners,
I don't like this collection at all, for two reasons:
- It encourages
cargo cult programming
- A great deal of these exampels could be made much easier
using a database instead of plain text files. Even a minimalist
database such as SQLite would greatly simplify tasks such as "Calculate
sum of the nth column of tabular data" or "Calculate sum of a set of
columns for each row". I mean, if you need to sum up some values,
you need to read all the text anyway, so while you are reading it,
it makes sense to export the data into a database, and then get
the stats in no time.
Since they are ready-to-use recipes, it would have been more
useful to save each case into a well written Perl script, with
properly named variables, and using a database when needed.
The way it is now, it will just spread the rumor of Perl being
a write-only language.
