Effective Perl Programming: Writing Better Programs with Perl

If you are experienced in other languages but new to Perl, you are probably still discovering Perl's idiosyncracies. This section deals with...

Perl is a language designed by a linguist, and as much as any human language, Perl is a language of idioms. What...

Regular expressions are the most obvious very high-level feature of Perl. A single pattern match in Perl—even a simple one—can perform the...

Item 23: Understand the difference between my and local. Item 24: Avoid using @_ directly—unless you have to. Item 25: Use wantarray...

At their heart, Perl references are a simple and extraordinarily useful feature, but their simplicity is obscured by a difficult syntax. In...

Although Perl is a great language for writing one-liners, it is also well-suited for writing larger programs. Perl programs several hundred lines...

Item 41: Don't reinvent the wheel—use Perl modules. Item 42: Understand packages and modules. Item 43: Make sure Perl can find the...

Item 45: Use h2xs to generate module boilerplate. Item 46: Embed your documentation with POD. Item 47: Use XS for low-level interfaces...

What is object-oriented programming? A good many books have been devoted to that topic in full, and many more, like this one,...

Item 53: Use pack and unpack for data munging. Item 54: Know how and when to use eval, require, and do. Item...