Contents of This Book

Chapter 1, Best Practices, explains why it might be worth reassessing your current coding practices. It discusses how coding styles are evolved, and sets out three broad criteria against which any existing or proposed coding practice can be assessed. The chapter also explains why good coding habits matter and suggests how they can be developed.

Chapter 2, Code Layout, tackles the many contentious issues of code layout. It suggests how to set out block delimiters; how to visually distinguish built-ins and keywords from subroutines and variables; where to place operators, terminators, delimiters, and other punctuation; how to improve readability by the consistent use of whitespace; the optimal width for code lines and block indents; how to set out lists of values; and where to break long expressions. It concludes by recommending a convenient tool that automates most of these layout tasks.

Chapter 3, Naming Conventions, presents a series of guidelines that can help you choose more descriptive names for variables, subroutines, and namespaces. It also demonstrates how the various components of a consistent naming scheme can work together to improve the overall maintainability of code, both by making it more readable and by reducing the need for deobfuscatory comments.

Chapter 4, Values and Expressions, provides a simple set of rules that can help you avoid common pitfalls when creating character strings, numbers, and lists. Topics include how to avoid unintended variable interpolation (and non-interpolation), reliable and readable approaches to nonprintable characters, defining constants, avoiding barewords, and taming heredocs, commas, long numbers, and lists.

Chapter 5, Variables, explores a robust approach to using variables. It explains the inherent drawbacks of package or punctuation variables, suggesting safer alternatives where possible, and safer practices where there are no alternatives. The second half of the chapter presents several efficient and maintainable techniques of handling data in arrays and hashes using the "container slicing" mechanism.

Chapter 6, Control Structures, examines Perl's rich variety of control structures, encouraging the use of those that are easier to maintain, less error-prone, or more efficient. The chapter provides a set of simple guidelines for deciding which of for, while, or map is most appropriate for a given task. The effective use of iterator variables is also discussed, including the common case of needing to iterate hash entries by key and value simultaneously.

Chapter 7, Documentation, suggests a series of techniques that can make documenting your code less tedious, and therefore more likely. It advocates a template-based approach to both user and technical documentation, and discusses when, where, and how to write useful and accurate comments.

Chapter 8, Built-in Functions, discusses better ways of using some of Perl's most popular built-in functions, including sort, reverse, scalar, eval, unpack, split, substr, values, select, sleep, map, and grep. It also summarizes the many other useful "non-built-in" builtins provided by two modules from the standard Perl distribution and one from CPAN.

Chapter 9, Subroutines, describes efficient and maintainable ways to write subroutines in Perl, including the use of positional, named, and optional arguments, argument validation and defaults, safe calling and return conventions, predictable return values in various contexts, and why subroutine prototypes and implicit returns should be avoided.

Chapter 10, I/O, explains how to open and close files reliably, when to use line-based input, how to correctly detect interactive applications, the importance of prompting, and how best to provide feedback to users during long non-interactive tasks.

Chapter 11, References, offers advice on demystifying Perl's many dereferencing syntaxes, discusses why symbolic references create more problems than they solve, and recommends ways to prevent cyclic reference chains from causing memory leaks.

Chapter 12, Regular Expressions, presents guidelines for using regular expressions. It recommends the use of extended formatting, suggests a simple but unusual fix for Perl's confusing "single-line" and "multiline" matching modes, warns of the perils of matching whitespace too precisely, shows how to avoid using the error-prone numeric variables, presents a robust approach to building complex regexes that are still maintainable, gives several hints on optimizing slow matches, and concludes by explaining when not to use regular expressions.

Chapter 13, Error Handling, advocates a coherent exception-based approach to error handling, and explains why exceptions are preferable to special return values or flags. It also recommends the use of exception objects, and explores in detail how they can be declared, created, thrown, caught, and handled.

Chapter 14, Command-Line Processing, addresses the design and implementation of command-line interfaces, both for individual programs and for application suites. It recommends several modules that can make your command-line interfaces more consistent and predictable, and at the same time can considerably reduce the effort required to implement those interfaces.

Chapter 15, Objects, and Chapter 16, Class Hierarchies, offer a robust and efficient approach to creating objects and class hierarchies in Perl. This approach provides fully encapsulated objects with no performance penalty, and supports single and multiple inheritance without the usual problems of attribute collision, incomplete initialization, partial destruction, or incorrect method autoloading. Chapter 16 also introduces a new module that allows these robust and efficient classes to be built semi-automatically.

Chapter 17, Modules, looks at non-object-oriented modules, exploring the best ways to create them, design their interfaces, declare and check their version numbers, and refactor existing code into them. This chapter also discusses the many existing modules that are freely available as part of the Perl standard library and on CPAN.

Chapter 18, Testing and Debugging, encourages the use of testing, advocating test-driven design and development using the core Test:: modules. It also offers tips on effective debugging techniques, including a description of various modules and other free tools that can make debugging easier.

Chapter 19, Miscellanea, offers several additional guidelines on miscellaneous topics such as revision control, interfacing to code written in other languages, processing configuration files, text formatting, tied variables, benchmarking and profiling your code, caching techniques, and some general advice on refactoring.

Appendix A, Essential Perl Best Practices, summarizes the 30 most important guidelines in the book in three one-page lists. Appendix B, Perl Best Practices, lists all 256 guidelines, with cross-references to their chapters and locations. Appendix C, Editor Configurations, provides some useful configuration options for the Vim, Vile, Emacs, TextWrangler, and BBEdit text editors. Appendix D, Recommended Modules and Utilities, lists and cross-references the various modules recommended throughout the book, and provides a brief summary of their most useful subroutines. Appendix E offers a short bibliography.