[ABQ-pm] Perl Best Practices

[Brian Arnold]

I'll admit that I'm a fairly quiet member of this list (I've been on  
it for easily 3+ years and probably haven't sent more than 3  
messages) because I haven't had much of a need for Perl (aside from  
personal fun) since moving back to Albuquerque. Well, that and I'm  
just not super confident of my abilities, as of yet.

So, I'm taking an artificial life class at UNM this semester, and I  
wanted to take advantage of this class as a reason to flex what  
little Perl ability that I had, as well as to increase my abilities  
quite a bit. For example, I'm having to put a GUI on things (which  
I'm using Tk for now - it's not so pretty, but it's functional, which  
is sufficient for now).

Having not done any real coding in Perl for awhile, I was totally  
lost - compound onto that how natural that object oriented  
programming feels for this sort of project, and me having never coded  
a module in my life, and sufficed to say, I've been utterly and  
completely lost. So, what do you do when you're this lost? You ask  
people. I asked Curtis "Ovid" Poe what the heck I should be doing. He  
pointed me at Perl Best Practices.

Thanks to my handy dandy O'reilly Safari account, I've been reading  
through this book for about a week now, and it's been absolutely  
amazing. Using things like the Smart::Comments and Class::Std and  
Module::Builder modules, I've now got a functional (albeit not  
complete) Perl app involving three modules I'm building myself, and  
it all makes a lot more sense than it ever did.

I feel like I'm probably a relative Perl peon on this list, but I  
think that every single one of us would benefit from at least a flip- 
through of this book. While I love access via Safari, I really need  
to pick up a dead-tree version really soon. This book has become a  
staple of my Perl library. I can't recommend it enough. I figured  
that my newfound love of this book would be a good reason to write  
out a message to this list. =)

--
Brian Arnold
brian at cs.unm.edu