As far as I'm concerned, Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices book should be required reading for any serious Perl programming, and should be mandatory for any team that does any serious Perl development. These best-practices and conventions are exactly the sort of thing that programming teams need to come to grips with, and establish shared norms for how to make their codebase clear and "clean."
Next time I come across a team of Perl scripters that needs to develop a set of team standards and strategies for how to do thse kinds of things, I'm simply going to tell them to get this book: read it together, discuss it, learn it, understand it, and then do it!
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2 comments:
Having read the example chapter online it does look good. However it also tends to reinforce my view that Perl is hard to write systems of any size in - too many things to trip over.
I maintain a couple of Perl scripts but all my new stuff is in Ruby or Python.
Not wanting to get into language flame wars though...!
Hmmn - Ive had to deal with large systems of Perl code (including 100K+ lines) on multiple occasions. One of them was almost 250K lines of code that was equal parts C, C++, Perl, and assembly.
At that size, or anything over the 25K lines mark, I found it no more or less difficult to write "good" systems in Perl than in C++. As long I has have good object-oriented design capabilities in the language and the ability to use many proven design patterns easily in that language (and a good/mature set of libraries) it really comes down to the practices far more than the language.
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