O'Reilly European Open Source Convention - 17-20 October, 2005

Tutorial
Perl Best Practices
Damian Conway, Thoughtstream

Track: Perl
Date: Monday, 17 October 2005
Time: 13:30 - 17:00
Location: Amsterdam Room
One of the major challenges of using Perl in a real-world development environment is that Perl's "More Than One Way To Do It" philosophy often means there are far too many choices when it comes to solving a particular problem with the language. When everyone is free to do it their own way, they often do so at the expense of maintainability, usability, and sometimes even performance.

This session details a range of consistent Perl coding practices aimed at producing robust, maintainable, and efficient control structures, data types, error handling, command-line interfaces, I/O, classes, regexes, subroutines and modules. It also examines the critical issues of code layout, debugging, and documentation.