Object Oriented Perl: A Comprehensive Guide to Concepts and Programming Techniques: Amazon.ca: Damian Conway, Randal L Schwartz: Books

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From Amazon

Perl has always been a powerful and popular programming language, but with its new object capabilities, it can do even more. Written for anyone with a little Perl experience, Damian Conway's Object Oriented Perl provides an invaluable guide to virtually every aspect of object-oriented programming in Perl.

The most notable thing about Object Oriented Perl is Conway's excellent perspective on object-oriented concepts and how they are implemented in Perl. This book does a remarkable job of cutting through traditional jargon and illustrating how basic object-oriented design techniques are handled in Perl. (A useful appendix attests to the author's wide-ranging knowledge, with a comparison of Smalltalk, Eiffel, C++, and Java with Perl, including a summary of object-oriented syntax for each.) This book also features a truly excellent review of basic Perl syntax.

Throughout this text, the author shows you the basics of solid object design (illustrated using classes that model music CDs). Basic concepts like inheritance and polymorphism get thorough and clear coverage. The book also points out common mistakes and provides many tips for navigating the powerful and flexible (yet sometimes tricky) nuances of using Perl objects. For instance, Conway shows how to achieve true data encapsulation in Perl (which generally allows calls across modules) as well as its natural support for generic programming techniques.

He also pays special attention to popular object modules available from CPAN (like Class::MethodmakerK, which simplifies declaring classes) and discusses performance issues and the tradeoff between programming convenience and speed often faced by today's Perl developer. Advanced chapters cover a number of techniques for adding persistence and invoking methods using multiple dispatching.

Filled with syntactic tips and tricks, Object Oriented Perl is a sure bet for any programmer who wants to learn how to use Perl objects effectively. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Perl language review, CPAN, Perl objects, 'blessing' and inheritance, polymorphism, Class::Struct and Class::Methodmaker modules, Perl ties and closures, operator overloading, encapsulation, multiple dispatch, Class::Multimethods, coarse-grained and fine-grained object persistence techniques, performance issues.

From Library Journal

Originally designed as a simple scripting language, Perl is now a full-fledged object-oriented programming language. Conway's guide discusses for experienced Perl programmers object-oriented design concepts and how they work in Perl. For academic and larger public library computer science collections.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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44 Reviews

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4.7 out of 5 stars (44 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book. Highly recommended., Jun 10 2004

By

Subrahmanyam Vadlamani "sidhaartha" (Irving, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Object Oriented Perl: A Comprehensive Guide to Concepts and Programming Techniques (Paperback)

Hi:

The author has a very methodical way of introducing concepts and overall has done a very good job. What seems like easy flow as far as the reader is concerned was probably a lot of hard work on his part.

The wry humor in the book alone is worth the money.

I am still unable to take the plethora of my perl scripts and modularize them but that is not the author's fault.

Compare this book with " Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules By Randal L. Schwartz". This does a much better exposition.

thanks

Sidhaartha

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4.0 out of 5 stars Makes perl more tolerable, April 22 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Object Oriented Perl: A Comprehensive Guide to Concepts and Programming Techniques (Paperback)

This is a good book because it shows some ways to make using the abomination known as Perl a slightly less infuriating experience. Use the samples from this book as cookie-cutter templates and you'll find that you can actually write useful programs beyond the typical 20-30 lines which is ordinarily Perl's maximum useful threshold before it deteriorates into illegible unmaintainable garbage.

For those like me who are forced to write Perl against their will, this book is a must-have. In contrast to some other Perl books out there, this one doesn't get into cutesy terminology like calling things 'spaceship operator' or similar uses of sloppy informal language.

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5.0 out of 5 stars The low-level "why" book, Oct 25 2003

By

Chuck Robey (Silver Spring, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Object Oriented Perl: A Comprehensive Guide to Concepts and Programming Techniques (Paperback)

Preface: I'm a detail person, the top level view is what I ignore to get to the facts. I am entirely turned off by the normal practice of writing up one or two example apps, and then ignoring giving the full details on commands, such as what all the options are, or what the syntax to uuse is. If your app is different than the example, you're pretty much out of luck. That's the situation that other books I'd bought had placed me, while I was trying to learn Perl for a non-trivial app I needed to deliver. I was so frustrated I was nearly in tears.

I don't recall what caused me to buy this book; perhaps it was the only Perl OO book. I am so glad I did, because the amount of info that the author has put into this book is amazing. Not just that, it's the *choices* he made, of what to explain. He's picked all the pieces that the other books glossed over, and examined the missing pieces, so that I now understand the"why" behind many oddities, and I now can push myself much farther forward.

Sort of like, the other books pose the questions, this book answers them.

If you only buy 2 Perl books, make this one of them. Ignore the fact that the title says OO. Yes, it does a great job of explaining how the OO features mechanically work, but the reason to buy this book is all the extra backgrounder info that's in this, it's worth twice what they're asking for. The data often has nothing to do with the OO features, he's probably remembering all the details that HE had to go run down, and he's giving us all these data pearls (pun intended) for free, along with the payment for the OO data.

Don't buy this book to learn object-oriented programming, but if you want to learn how Perl manages to add OO features, and accidentally learn how Perl adds in a great many other features, then you're in the right place.

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Most recent customer reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly Disappointing
After reading so many positive reviews of Damian Conway's "Object Oriented (OO) Perl," I decided to buy a copy and increase my understanding of said subject. Read more

Published on Aug 13 2003 by Jake

4.0 out of 5 stars For OO Perl, this is the book.
If you've done the Learning Perl, Programming Perl and maybe the Perl Cookbook books, and still want to know more about OO Perl, this book should make you very well rounded.

Published on May 10 2003 by Tim Greer