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.

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

In reply to Re^3: What's on your Bookshelf (related to perl)? by Juerd
in thread What's on your Bookshelf (related to perl)? by ghenry

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