Perl Hacks

Chapter 1. Productivity Hacks

Hacks 1-11

Everyone wants to be more productive. That's probably why you use Perl: to get more work done in less time with less work.

Productivity isn't all about saving time, though. Saving effort is even more important, whether you mean finding the information you want, automating away repeated tasks, or finding ways not to have to think about things that you do all the time. In some ways, this is the notion of relentless automation—finding every little niggling task that always interrupts your current project by being so annoying, difficult, cumbersome, or different and then hiding it behind an alias, a shell script, a process, or whatever.

Here are a few ideas for ways to make your programming life easier and more productive. Try them, enjoy your new sense of free time, and let yourself notice the new points of friction in your life. Then solve them, too!

Hack #1. Add CPAN Shortcuts to Firefox

Keep module documentation and distributions mere keystrokes away.

If Perl has only one advantage over other programming languages, it's the number of modules on the CPAN (http://www.cpan.org/) that solve so many problems effectively. That brings up a smaller problem, though—choosing an appropriate module for the job.

http://search.cpan.org/ helps, but if you visit the site many times a day, the steps to start a search through the web interface can become annoying. Fortunately, the Mozilla family of web browsers, including Mozilla Firefox, let you set up shortcuts ...