A book full of examples of how NOT to write perl

I couldn't resist the title, so I got this book. Unfortunately, I cannot reccommend it to people who want to learn to write better Perl, execpt as a source of examples of the mistakes you should avoid.

For example, in one of the earliest examples, the authors uses "return undef" in a situation where the return value of the routine is assigned to an array, to indicate the routine didn't find any of whatever it was looking for. Unfortunately, this is a mistake, the correct code would be to use "return;" all on its own. The correct solution produces an empty array or interim values; the mistake creates an array containing one element, 'undef'.

There are a number of similar mistakes which indicate the author is in over his head, writing things he doesn't understand; the editors know even less about the matter; and the code was never tested and verified for correctness.

If you want to learn Perl, get "Learning Perl"; If you want to improve your Perl, get "Intermediate Perl.

Tom

Other Reviews

• a mixed bag of solid scripting
• A book full of examples of how NOT to write perl
• Good, yes. Wicked cool, maybe not.