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Perl Best Practice

One of the major challenges of using Perl in a 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 using the language. This makes coding standards and the use of best-practice techniques especially important in Perl development.

The full three-day course explores maintainable, robust, and efficient coding practices for:

• Data

• use of constants

• barewords

• references and dereferencing

• Variables

• general naming conventions

• naming conventions for non-scalars

• multi-level vs multi-part keys

• sanitizing Perl's magic punctuation variables

• Subroutines

• layout

• calling conventions

• argument passing conventions

• use of prototypes

• Functions and control structures

• choosing between maps and for loops

• efficient sorting techniques

• Packages and modules

• naming conventions

• designing module interfaces

• exporting symbols

• package layout

• lexicals vs package variables

• use of the standard library and CPAN modules

• Object-orientation

• interface design

• method and attribute naming conventions

• inheritance and polymorphism issues in advanced classes

• reliable OO constructor and destructor techniques

• standardized encapsulation

• use and preferred implementation of class attributes

• Control flow

• standardizing loop structures

• prefix vs postfix controls

• considerations in selecting between list processing and iteration

• Error handling

• error detection

• lexical vs "classic" warnings

• warning and error handlers

• reporting errors

• return values vs exceptions

• I/O

• file I/O

• stream I/O

• efficient file slurping (linear and recursive)

• Documentation

• commenting styles

• pod layout and structure

• tactical and strategic documentation

• consistency techniques

• Interface design

• general principles

• "intuitive" design techniques

• interface size vs convenience

• Miscellaneous

• use and flagging of context

• standards for command-line syntax design and parsing

• handling common data formats (e.g. CSV, HTML, XML)

The one- and two-day course variants cover selected subsets of the above material and can be tailored to highlight particular areas of interest and differing levels of experience.

Course format

1, 2, or 3 days seminar

Who should attend

Perl programmers who work as part of a development team or who simply wish to write better, more reliable, ore maintainable code.