Perl Hacks: Tips and Tools for Programming, Debugging, and Surviving

With more than a million dedicated programmers, Perl has proven to be the best computing language for the latest trends in computing and business. While other languages have stagnated, Perl remains fresh, thanks to its community-based development model, which encourages the sharing of information among users. This tradition of knowledge-sharing allows developers to find answers to almost any Perl question they can dream up.

And you can find many of those answers right here in Perl Hacks. Like all books in O'Reilly's Hacks Series, Perl Hacks appeals to a variety of programmers, whether you're an experienced developer or a dabbler who simply enjoys exploring technology. Each hack is a short lesson--some are practical exercises that teach you essential skills, while others merely illustrate some of the fun things that Perl can do. Most hacks have two parts: a direct answer to the immediate problem you need to solve right now and a deeper, subtler technique that you can adapt to other situations. Learn how to add CPAN shortcuts to the Firefox web browser, read files backwards, write graphical games in Perl, and much more.

For your convenience, Perl Hacks is divided by topic--not according to any sense of relative difficulty--so you can skip around and stop at any hack you like. Chapters include:

• Productivity Hacks
• User Interaction
• Data Munging
• Working with Modules
• Object Hacks
• Debugging

Whether you're a newcomer or an expert, you'll find great value in Perl Hacks, the only Perl guide that offers something useful and fun for everyone.

chromatic manages Onyx Neon Press, an independent publisher. His areas of expertise include agile software development, language design, and virtual machines for dynamic languages. He is also a published novelist. His books include The Art of Agile Development and Masterminds of Programming.

Dr. Damian Conway is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), where he teaches object-oriented software engineering. He is an effective teacher, an accomplished writer, and the author of several popular Perl modules. He is also a semi-regular contributor to the Perl Journal. In 1998 he was the winner of the Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility for two modules (Getopt::Declare and Lingua::EN::Inflect) and in 1999 he won his second "Larry" for his Coy.pm haiku-generation module.

Curtis (Ovid) Poe is a CPAN author, a TPF Steering Committee Member, and the TPF Grant Committee Secretary. He likes long walks on the beach and single malt scotch, but hates writing bios. Ovid writes for Perl.com too.