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Overview

The newest version of Modern Perl is another great installment in the series written by chromatic. If you've read the first edition of Modern Perl, than you know that it is unlike the standard slew. While books such as the O'Reilly Perl series(learning this, programming that) focus mainly on the language, Modern Perl looks at Perl as a community. It shows some modern best practices and how to use Perl as it stands today. I highly recommend Modern Perl 2011-2012 edition to anyone who uses Perl. It shows how to capitalize on Perl's strengths and how to pave over some of it's weaknesses.

Review

Modern Perl focuses on more than the Perl language. Right off the bat it points out the Perl community. It's like, "Here's Perl" and then, "This is how you get, how you get to Perl Street". Very refreshing as the Perl community is a big a part of what makes Perl great. In my opinion, every Perl book should briefly explain CPAN and the Perl community briefly. With a focus on using modern Perl features and best practices, Modern Perl gives a lot of interesting and important information regarding writing maintainable Perl.

The first two chapters focus on Perl the entity. The power of CPAN, the community, and the philosophy are flaunted and displayed in these introductory chapters. These chapters deserve at least a skim. Interesting stuff.

Chapters three, four, five, and six cover Perl the language. Everything from scalars to loops to regular expressions. Everything is kept nice and brief with some idioms and other nice modern practice spice sprinkled all about. Again, worth a read. If nothing else, you won't be oblivious to alternate view points.

Chapter seven is where we hit where Modern Perl begins to excel. This is the chapter that shows how modern OOP is implemented in Perl in a nice way using Moose. This is essentially a solid base and jumping point for diving into larger Perl projects. I really liked this chapter. It was short and sweet. Peppered with very nice illustrative snippets. Just a very snappy chapter that will make Moose seem very intriguing and cause Perl OOP to not feel like such a chore.

Chapter eight is a testicular kick of useful information. It basically goes over a lot of best practices. It is chock full of useful tips and tidbits about writing maintainable Perl code. Definitely worth checking out. In my opinion, chapter 8 should be a requirement to download Perl.

Chapter nine gives useful information in using Perl in the large. Testing, modules, distribution, and a lot more. If you want to take your Perl to a larger scale, you should definitely read, study, and internalize this chapter.

Chapter ten goes over the wonders of Perl idioms and the super globals, the variables that are not scoped to any package or file. Obviously, a good read. A bit dry, but worth a read. It's really short after all.

Chapter eleven dances with the hilarious world of worst practices. What to avoid. What not to do. I found some of this mildly entertaining. Kind of like Jewish humor... At any rate, it goes great with chapter eight. And since that rhymes, you know it's true.

Finally, chapter twelve goes over more "useful" tidbits. The title is "What's missing?" but covers a couple of pragmas and a couple incompatibilities between Perl versions and how to solve them. Not much going on in this chapter. Kind of lame and unnecessary, but it is what it is.

Conclusion

Outside of a few minor typos I noticed and chapter twelve, I really don't have anything negative to say about Modern Perl. However, I will say that it pushes the Modern::Perl module really hard. That's expected, but meh. Not my cup of tea. Some people love it though. Or, almost forgot. Did I mention, Modern Perl is available for free from it's website?

And of course, to see this post in all its glory, visit my blog


In reply to Modern Perl 2011-2012 Edition by bms

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