Perl Medic a disappointment? How so?

It doesn't quite deliver on its cover promises. Perl Medic is a good book that I would recommend to friends learning Perl, but I fail to see how it's really to do with the medic part. The part in the beginning of the book, about politics around programming in the professional world, is very valuable information one doesn't read in other places. The rest of the book appears to be written for beginning programmers, who in my opinion will benefit from a book like Beginning Perl.

I expected an advanced level book, written to help maintaining awkward legacy code. The text on the cover fortified that expectation. I also expected more examples of what one will encounter. Simple things like how for (@_) { ... } in older versions of Perl didn't check if something was read only, and that you can often fix this by simply copying the array, like so: for (my @copy = @_) { ... }. It doesn't have enough of that kind of Perl-specific advice, that is necessary to effectively deal with old and broken code you inherit.

Okay, if that's what you were expecting I could see why you would be disappointed. I agree that the book is only marginally about legacy code.

What I like about it is that it's the best book I've seen about writing high-quality maintainable perl. It's not an "advanced" book in terms of teaching tricks and sneaky techniques, but rather just the opposite -- it's about doing things right.

I would also agree that there was hardly anything in this book that I didn't mostly know already at this point, but what's great about it is that it puts all of the advice that I normally give to co-workers -- write tests, use perltidy, use templates for web apps, etc. -- in one place. I wish every perl programmer would read this book.