Perl Best Practices (Paperback)

Description:

Many programmers code by instinct, relying on convenient habits or a "style" they picked up early on. They aren't conscious of all the choices they make, like how they format their source, the names they use for variables, or the kinds of loops they use. They're focused entirely on problems they're solving, solutions they're creating, and algorithms they're implementing. So they write code in the way that seems natural, that happens intuitively, and that feels good.

But if you're serious about your profession, intuition isn't enough.  Perl Best Practices author Damian Conway explains that rules, conventions, standards, and practices not only help programmers communicate and coordinate with one another, they also provide a reliable framework for thinking about problems, and a common language for expressing solutions. This is especially critical in Perl, because the language is designed to offer many ways to accomplish the same task, and consequently it supports many incompatible dialects.

With a good dose of Aussie humor, Dr. Conway (familiar to many in the Perl community) offers 256 guidelines on the art of coding to help you write better Perl code--in fact, the best Perl code you possibly can.  The guidelines cover code layout, naming conventions, choice of data and control structures, program decomposition, interface design and implementation, modularity, object orientation, error handling, testing, and debugging.

They're designed to work together to produce code that is clear, robust, efficient, maintainable, and concise, but Dr. Conway doesn't pretend that this is the one true universal and unequivocal set of best practices. Instead, Perl Best Practices offers coherent and widely applicable suggestions based on real-world experience of how code is actually written, rather than on someone's ivory-tower theories on how software ought to be created.

Most of all, Perl Best Practices offers guidelines that actually work, and that many developers around the world are already using.  Much like Perl itself, these guidelines are about helping you to get your job done, without getting in the way.

Table of Contents:

Preface

1. Best Practices

     Three Goals

     This Book

     Rehabiting

2. Code Layout

     Bracketing

     Keywords

     Subroutines and Variables

     Builtins

     Keys and Indices

     Operators

     Semicolons

     Commas

     Line Lengths

     Indentation

     Tabs

     Blocks

     Chunking

     Elses

     Vertical Alignment

     Breaking Long Lines

     Non-Terminal Expressions

     Breaking by Precedence

     Assignments

     Ternaries

     Lists

     Automated Layout

3. Naming Conventions

     Identifiers

     Booleans

     Reference Variables

     Arrays and Hashes

     Underscores

     Capitalization

     Abbreviations

     Ambiguous Abbreviations

     Ambiguous Names

     Utility Subroutines

4. Values and Expressions

     String Delimiters

     Empty Strings

     Single-Character Strings

     Escaped Characters

     Constants

     Leading Zeros

     Long Numbers

     Multiline Strings

     Here Documents

     Heredoc Indentation

     Heredoc Terminators

     Heredoc Quoters

     Barewords

     Fat Commas

     Thin Commas

     Low-Precedence Operators

     Lists

     List Membership

5. Variables

     Lexical Variables

     Package Variables

     Localization

     Initialization

     Punctuation Variables

     Localizing Punctuation Variables

     Match Variables

     Dollar-Underscore

     Array Indices

     Slicing

     Slice Layout

     Slice Factoring

6. Control Structures

     If Blocks

     Postfix Selectors

     Other Postfix Modifiers

     Negative Control Statements

     C-Style Loops

     Unnecessary Subscripting

     Necessary Subscripting

     Iterator Variables

     Non-Lexical Loop Iterators

     List Generation

     List Selections

     List Transformation

     Complex Mappings

     List Processing Side Effects

     Multipart Selections

     Value Switches

     Tabular Ternaries

     do-while Loops

     Linear Coding

     Distributed Control

     Redoing

     Loop Labels

7. Documentation

     Types of Documentation

     Boilerplates

     Extended Boilerplates

     Location

     Contiguity

     Position

     Technical Documentation

     Comments

     Algorithmic Documentation

     Elucidating Documentation

     Defensive Documentation

     Indicative Documentation

     Discursive Documentation

     Proofreading

8. Built-in Functions

     Sorting

     Reversing Lists

     Reversing Scalars

     Fixed-Width Data

     Separated Data

     Variable-Width Data

     String Evaluations

     Automating Sorts

     Substrings

     Hash Values

     Globbing

     Sleeping

     Mapping and Grepping

     Utilities

9. Subroutines

     Call Syntax

     Homonyms

     Argument Lists

     Named Arguments

     Missing Arguments

     Default Argument Values

     Scalar Return Values

     Contextual Return Values

     Multi-Contextual Return Values

     Prototypes

     Implicit Returns

     Returning Failure

10. I/O

     Filehandles

     Indirect Filehandles

     Localizing Filehandles

     Opening Cleanly

     Error Checking

     Cleanup

     Input Loops

     Line-Based Input

     Simple Slurping

     Power Slurping

     Standard Input

     Printing to Filehandles

     Simple Prompting

     Interactivity

     Power Prompting

     Progress Indicators

     Automatic Progress Indicators

     Autoflushing

11. References

     Dereferencing

     Braced References

     Symbolic References

     Cyclic References

12. Regular Expressions

     Extended Formatting

     Line Boundaries

     String Boundaries

     End of String

     Matching Anything

     Lazy Flags

     Brace Delimiters

     Other Delimiters

     Metacharacters

     Named Characters

     Properties

     Whitespace

     Unconstrained Repetitions

     Capturing Parentheses

     Captured Values

     Capture Variables

     Piecewise Matching

     Tabular Regexes

     Constructing Regexes

     Canned Regexes

     Alternations

     Factoring Alternations

     Backtracking

     String Comparisons

13. Error Handling

     Exceptions

     Builtin Failures

     Contextual Failure

     Systemic Failure

     Recoverable Failure

     Reporting Failure

     Error Messages

     Documenting Errors

     OO Exceptions

     Volatile Error Messages

     Exception Hierarchies

     Processing Exceptions

     Exception Classes

     Unpacking Exceptions

14. Command-Line Processing

     Command-Line Structure

     Command-Line Conventions

     Meta-options

     In-situ Arguments

     Command-Line Processing

     Interface Consistency

     Interapplication Consistency

15. Objects

     Using OO

     Criteria

     Pseudohashes

     Restricted Hashes

     Encapsulation

     Constructors

     Cloning

     Destructors

     Methods

     Accessors

     Lvalue Accessors

     Indirect Objects

     Class Interfaces

     Operator Overloading

     Coercions

16. Class Hierarchies

     Inheritance

     Objects

     Blessing Objects

     Constructor Arguments

     Base Class Initialization

     Construction and Destruction

     Automating Class Hierarchies

     Attribute Demolition

     Attribute Building

     Coercions

     Cumulative Methods

     Autoloading

17. Modules

     Interfaces

     Refactoring

     Version Numbers

     Version Requirements

     Exporting

     Declarative Exporting

     Interface Variables

     Creating Modules

     The Standard Library

     CPAN

18. Testing and Debugging

     Test Cases

     Modular Testing

     Test Suites

     Failure

     What to Test

     Debugging and Testing

     Strictures

     Warnings

     Correctness

     Overriding Strictures

     The Debugger

     Manual Debugging

     Semi-Automatic Debugging

19. Miscellanea

     Revision Control

     Other Languages

     Configuration Files

     Formats

     Ties

     Cleverness

     Encapsulated Cleverness

     Benchmarking

     Memory

     Caching

     Memoization

     Caching for Optimization

     Profiling

     Enbugging

A. Essential Perl Best Practices

B. Perl Best Practices

C. Editor Configurations

D. Recommended Modules and Utilities

E. Bibliography

Index