All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Learning Perl v3: Chapter 1

zatoichi on 2004-02-24T22:54:14

A step into history. Perl's, of course.

Chapter 1 was basically a journey through the history of Perl. It also had how to get it and how to install it among other things.

I am on Windows (for now) and using ActiveStates version of Perl. So the setup was easy. I messed around with 'perldoc' because I read in the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup that it was a very good Perl tool to know.

I have made a resolution that my Perl code will not be "line noise".

My mantra will be:

use strict;
use warnings;
comment as needed
clarity above brevity

no line noise! :D

WebDragon on 2004-02-25T11:56:32

I've posted a bunch of my scripts on http://www.webdragon.net/perl.htm that I've released to the public, if you'd care to have a look at them and some of the ugly hacks required to work around the way the world works :-D

I'd add to your list
  o write really good documentation (in perl .pod format, preferably) as you go
  o document your changes with a decent changelog (and comments within the code) as you repair your programs over time.
  o the reason for this is: maintainability.
  o write tests (good ones) to prove your code works the way it's supposed to. beat the hell outta it with tests. It'll still break on someone else's system, but not quite as often ;)

On writing tests...

zatoichi on 2004-02-25T14:17:07

I have read a little about unit tests. I haven't a clue at this point on how to do them. : )

On the list though.

Re:On writing tests...

WebDragon on 2004-02-25T18:52:58

fire up the CPAN shell and look at all the Test:: modules there are :) Fire up the CPAN shell and download ANY module and look at its tests. (well, maybe not Math::BigInt. which has thousands of tests)

cpan> i /^Test::/ :-)

Re:On writing tests...

zatoichi on 2004-02-25T19:52:20

I will do so. Thanks.