Higher-Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Perl's been around forever. But most Perl coders still haven't mastered many of its sophisticated capabilities: They write as if they were still working in C. In Higher-Order Perl, Mark Jason Dominus illuminates Perl techniques that resemble Lisp far more than C. By learning Dominus’s techniques, you can accomplish things in Perl that can’t be done any other way and automate tasks you'd struggle to handle conventionally.

Dominus shows how to use recursion to make functions more flexible, and how to use caching to overcome many of the performance problems that often afflict recursive functions. You’ll learn how to use iterators; and when (and how) to replace recursion with iterators. You’ll discover better ways to handle parsing; master advanced declarative programming techniques; and more. You were impressed with Perl before, but you didn’t know the half of it. Bill Camarda, from the July 2005 Read Only

From the Publisher

"Higher-Order Perl is the most exciting, most clearly-written, most comprehensive, and most forward-looking programming book I've read in at least ten years. It's your map to the future of programming in any language."
—Sean M. Burke, Leading Programmer, Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN)
Most Perl programmers were originally trained as C and Unix programmers, so the Perl programs that they write bear a strong resemblance to C programs. However, Perl incorporates many features that have their roots in other languages such as Lisp. These advanced features are not well understood and are rarely used by most Perl programmers, but they are very powerful. They can automate tasks in everyday programming that are difficult to solve in any other way. One of the most powerful of these techniques is writing functions that manufacture or modify other functions. For example, instead of writing ten similar functions, a programmer can write a general pattern or framework that can then create the functions as needed according to the pattern. For several years Mark Jason Dominus has worked to apply functional programming techniques to Perl. Now Mark brings these flexible programming methods that he has successfully taught in numerous tutorials and training sessions to a wider audience.

Dr. Dobb’s Journal, November 2005 - Gregory V. Wilson

"It’s well written...everyone who claims to be an expert ought to read it..these techniques allow programmers to accomplish far more than they’re used to."

Computing Reviews, Association for Computing Machinery, July 2005 - Martin Schweitzer

"It is, quite simply, one of the best books on programming I have read for a long time."

August 2005 - gaal.livejournal.com

"I love it in any book, but tech books of course are typically expected to do something like append to your knowledge, so when one takes it in unexpected directions that’s terrific. Okay, I actually expected no less from this book - MJD is a joyfully intelligent writer."

Product Details

• ISBN: 1558607013
  
• ISBN-13: 9781558607019
• Format: Paperback, 600pp
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
• Pub. Date: March 2005
• Sales Rank: 140,878

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents