reviews/perl-medic.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<page title="Perl Medic" keywords="">
<item>
<p>Author: Peter Scott</p>
<p>ISBN: <isbn>0-201-79526-4</isbn></p>
<p>Publisher: <a href="http://www.awprofessional.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0201795264">Addison Wesley</a></p>
<p>Reviewed by: Dave Cross</p>
</item><item>
<p>A quote on the front cover of this book says "if you code in Perl then
you need to read this book". That's a pretty bold claim to make. It made
me think of the hyperbole on covers of books that claim to teach you to
program in Perl in just a few days. But this book is published by
Addison Wesley, who are a well respected technical publisher of
technical books and the quote is from Adam Turoff who certainly knows
what he's talking about when it comes to Perl programming. So in this
case the claim isn't hyperbole. The book really is one that I want every
Perl programmer to read.</p>
<p>Perl gets a lot of bad press from people who claim that it encourages
people to write unreadable code. Whilst there's certainly a lot of very
bad Perl code out there I think that's more a sign that it's used by a
lot of people who don't know how to program than a reflection on the
language itself. And that's where this book comes in. It assumes that
you are familiar with the syntax of Perl but that you've never really
been shown how to use it effectively. Which is a situation that many
Perl programmers find themselves in.</p>
<p>Perl Medic is actually targetted at people who have to maintain older
Perl code written by someone else, but I think that the information it
contains is just as useful to anyone coding in Perl. Peter Scott has a
lot of experience in writing Perl and in training other people to write
Perl and the distillation of that experience and knowledge into these
300-odd pages mean that there are few Perl programmers who won't pick up
something useful from this book.</p>
<p>The main emphasis in the book is on increasing the maintainability of
code. The techniques are wide-ranging. I particularly enjoyed the
examples of refactoring programs and the coverage of using modules from
CPAN. Two other very good sections are the one on antipatterns in
chapter 4 and the one on cargo cult programming in chapter 6. Together
these sections give a programmer a number of easy to recognise quick
wins when improving existing code and a checklist of things not to do
when writing new code.</p>
<p>There are a couple of niggles. I've already mentioned that I think the
book has been slightly mis-targetted and that it should have been aimed
at anyone writing Perl code. The other problem that I had was that the
medic analogy that runs through the book gets a bit strained at times.
But these are only minor and they shouldn't prevent you from adding this
book to your library.</p>
<p>In fact, all in all, the quote on the front cover is pretty accurate.</p>
</item>
</page>
reviews/perl-medic.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<page title="Perl Medic" keywords="">
<item>
<p>Author: Peter Scott</p>
<p>ISBN: <isbn>0-201-79526-4</isbn></p>
<p>Publisher: <a href="http://www.awprofessional.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0201795264">Addison Wesley</a></p>
<p>Reviewed by: Dave Cross</p>
</item><item>
<p>A quote on the front cover of this book says "if you code in Perl then
you need to read this book". That's a pretty bold claim to make. It made
me think of the hyperbole on covers of books that claim to teach you to
program in Perl in just a few days. But this book is published by
Addison Wesley, who are a well respected technical publisher of
technical books and the quote is from Adam Turoff who certainly knows
what he's talking about when it comes to Perl programming. So in this
case the claim isn't hyperbole. The book really is one that I want every
Perl programmer to read.</p>
<p>Perl gets a lot of bad press from people who claim that it encourages
people to write unreadable code. Whilst there's certainly a lot of very
bad Perl code out there I think that's more a sign that it's used by a
lot of people who don't know how to program than a reflection on the
language itself. And that's where this book comes in. It assumes that
you are familiar with the syntax of Perl but that you've never really
been shown how to use it effectively. Which is a situation that many
Perl programmers find themselves in.</p>
<p>Perl Medic is actually targetted at people who have to maintain older
Perl code written by someone else, but I think that the information it
contains is just as useful to anyone coding in Perl. Peter Scott has a
lot of experience in writing Perl and in training other people to write
Perl and the distillation of that experience and knowledge into these
300-odd pages mean that there are few Perl programmers who won't pick up
something useful from this book.</p>
<p>The main emphasis in the book is on increasing the maintainability of
code. The techniques are wide-ranging. I particularly enjoyed the
examples of refactoring programs and the coverage of using modules from
CPAN. Two other very good sections are the one on antipatterns in
chapter 4 and the one on cargo cult programming in chapter 6. Together
these sections give a programmer a number of easy to recognise quick
wins when improving existing code and a checklist of things not to do
when writing new code.</p>
<p>There are a couple of niggles. I've already mentioned that I think the
book has been slightly mis-targetted and that it should have been aimed
at anyone writing Perl code. The other problem that I had was that the
medic analogy that runs through the book gets a bit strained at times.
But these are only minor and they shouldn't prevent you from adding this
book to your library.</p>
<p>In fact, all in all, the quote on the front cover is pretty accurate.</p>
</item>
</page>