HN Books @HNBooksMonth

It's dusty, but I can't throw it away.

Effective Perl Programming.*

A long time ago, when I was a college kid with tons of free time, I'd sit for hours at Borders* or Barnes & Noble and just read computer books. God bless those employees for never kicking a 20-something poor kid out who lived on free coffee refills, yet never bought books.

At the time, Perl was more significant. Something about its syntax made sense, even though nowadays I cringe at it. Though Python is worse, in a different way...

A decade later, and I still sometimes need to spit out the results of a bunch of commands, iterate through them with some regex, format it, etc. Perl became the internet's 'duct-tape' for a reason.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Perl-Programming-Idiomatic-...

[2] https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/borders-files-for-ba...

The book that really helped me out the most with Perl was "Effective Perl Programming" (aka "Silver Ball" due to the original cover). Here's a link: http://www.amazon.com/Effective-Perl-Programming-Idiomatic-D...

The thing I liked most about that book was that it really helped me get a grasp on Perl idioms and start writing decent, readable Perl code. The thing you'll find out quickly about Perl is that it can be much easier to write than it is to read. I've written more than my fair share of Perl code which I've let rot for a while, tried coming back and reading and been left scratching my head.

Two excellent books I can recommend for someone working with legacy Perl:

Perl Medic (Peter J. Scott) - http://amzn.com/0201795264 Effective Perl Programming (Joseph N. Hall, Joshua A. McAdams, brian d foy) - http://amzn.com/0321496949

Besides those, having a good reference to the language is also essential. For example, I keep Perl In a Nutshell close by, even though I almost always just search http://perldoc.perl.org/ when I need that info.