Perl Best Practices

Preface

This book is designed to help you write better Perl code: in fact, the best Perl code you possibly can. It's a collection of 256 guidelines covering various aspects of the art of coding, including layout, name selection, choice of data and control structures, program decomposition, interface design and implementation, modularity, object orientation, error handling, testing, and debugging. These guidelines have been developed and refined over a programming career spanning 22 years. They're designed to work well together, and to produce code that is clear, robust, efficient, maintainable, and concise.

Mind you, that's not easy to achieve. Conciseness can be the natural enemy of clarity; efficiency the nemesis of maintainability. And armouring code to make it sufficiently robust can undermine clarity, efficiency, conciseness, and maintainability. Sometimes it's a case of: "Choose any one."

This book doesn't try to offer the one true universal and unequivocal set of best practices. There are as many ways of measuring code quality, and as many dimensions in which code can be judged, as there are programmers to make those assessments. Each programmer and each programming team will have their own opinions about the most important and desirable attributes of code.

What this book offers instead is a set of best practices: a set that is coherent, widely applicable, balanced in its aims, and that is based on real-world experience of how code is actually written, rather than on someone's ...