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October 6th, 2006

Perl program can vary dramatically from person to

Perl program can vary dramatically from person to person. Our goal is to help you minimize the development, debugging, and maintenance time you need for your own Perl programs. Do not take the title of this book to imply we are debugging Perl itself in these pages. What few bugs exist in the Perl interpreter are a matter of minute exotica (or exotic minutiae), rapidly squashed by the fine volunteer crew supporting Perl. A more accurate title would have been Debugging Your Perl Programs, but that felt too pedestrian and loses the “unplugged” pun. We wrote this book because we wanted you to see the development process at work. Most books on programming contain carefully crafted examples honed through sweaty practice to work perfectly and stand as mute testimonial to the elegant style of the author. They don’t show you the ugly, irritating process it took to get the examples into shape; yet those examples did not in fact spring into existence fully formed from the forehead of their creator. Because you will experience this same process when developing your programs, we want to guide you through it and describe various ways around the embarrassment, humiliation, and surprising pitfalls that stand between you and Great Programming. Within this book, we describe the most common and annoying mistakes a new Perl programmer might make, and then detail the procedures to identify and correct those bugs and any others. You should have some knowledge of Perl; several fine tutorials exist to free us from the onerous responsibility of explaining scalars and arrays and hashes and the like. This preface includes a few references to some of the most useful of these tutorials. We will not attempt to define or describe a proper programming “style.” Style is as unique as an individual but a few general rules create a common reference so that we can easily read each other’s programs. Neither is this a “how to program” book. Although we will probe into the mechanics and underpinnings of the general principle of programming at times, it is not our intention to inculcate a complete newcomer with the mindset of the programmer’s discipline. Who Are You? If you’ve been programming in Perl anywhere from a week to a year and want to speed up your development cycle, this book is for you. We’ll also address some issues related to developing in a team. This book is intended to assist those who have started learning Perl by providing practical advice on development practices. What This Book Covers Here’s what you’ll find in the rest of this book: Chapter 1: Introduction and a guided tour of the Perl documentation Chapter 2: Developing the right mindset for programming and developing effectively Chapter 3: “Gotchas” in Perl: Working your way around some of the tricky things to understand or get right in Perl programming Chapter 4: Antibugging: How to code defensively Chapter 5: How to instrument your code Chapter 6: How to test your Perl programs Chapter 7: A tour of the perl debugger: our guide to using this built-in tool
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