Review: Perl Hacks

[Dave Cross]

(Feel free to publish on the web site)

Perl Hacks
Author(s): 	chromatic with Damian Conway and Curtis "Ovid" Poe
Publisher: 	O'Reilly (2006)
ISBN: 		0596526741
Reviewer: 	Dave Cross


To be completely honest, this isn't the book I thought it was going to 
be. Most O'Reilly Hacks books start off pretty simply and in a few 
chapters take you to the further reaches of their subject area. Whilst 
this is a great way to quickly get a good taste of a particular topic, 
it has the occasional disadvantage that for subjects that you know well, 
the first couple of chapters can seem a bit basic. As I know Perl pretty 
well, I thought I would be on familiar ground for at least half of the book.

I was wrong.

Oh, it started off easily enough. Making use of various browser and 
command line tools to get easy access to Perl documentation, creating 
some useful shell aliases to cut down typing for your most common tasks. 
"Oh yes", I thought smugly to myself, "I know all that". But by about 
Hack 5 I was reading about little tweaks that I didn't know about. I'd 
start a hack thinking that I knew everything that the authors were going 
to cover and end up frustrated that I was on the tube and couldn't 
immediately try out the new trick I had just learnt.

It's really that kind of book. Pretty much everyone who reads it will 
pick up something that will it easier for them to get their job done 
(well, assuming that their job involves writing Perl code!) And, of 
course, looking at the list of authors, that's only to be expected. The 
three authors listed on the cover are three of the Perl communities most 
respected members. And the list of other contributers reads like a who's 
who of people who are doing interesting things with Perl - people whose 
use.perl journals are always interesting or whose posts on Perl Monks 
are worth reading before other people's. Luckily, it turns out that all 
these excellent programmers can also explain what they are doing (and 
why they are doing it) very clearly.

Like all books in the Hacks series, it's a little bitty. The hacks are 
organised into nine broad chapters, but the connections between hacks in 
the same chapter can sometimes be a bit hard to see. But I enjoyed that. 
In places it made the book a bit of a rollercoaster ride. You're never 
quite sure what is coming next, but you know it's going to be fun.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more apt the fairground analogy 
seems. When you ask Perl programmers what they like about Perl, you'll 
often hear "fun" mentioned near the top of the list. People use Perl 
because they enjoy it. And the authors' enjoyment of Perl really comes 
through in the book. It's obvious that they really wanted to show people 
the things that they thought were really cool.

Although I did learn useful tips from the earlier part of the book, it 
was really the last three chapters that were the most useful for me. 
Chapter 7, Developer Tricks, had a lot of useful things to say about 
testing, Chapter 8, Know Thy Code, contains a lot of information on 
using Perl to examine your Perl code and Chapter 9, Expand Your Perl Foo 
was a grab-bag of obscure (but still useful) Perl tricks.

So where does this book fit in to O'Reilly's Perl canon? I can't 
recommend it for beginners. But if you're a working Perl programmer with 
a couple of years' experience then I'd be very surprised if you didn't 
pick up something that will be useful to you. And don't worry about it 
overlapping with other books in your Perl library - offhand I can't 
think of anything in the book that has been covered in any previous Perl 
book.

All in all, this would make a very useful addition to your Perl library.