Product Description

Techniques and tricks to master basic and advanced OO Perl for programmers who already have basic to intermediate skills in procedural Perl.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #161817 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-01
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 490 pages

Amazon.com
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.

Development Exchange, November 99
"Object Oriented Perl is well written and communicates a lot of technical know-how to its readers, both in terms of specific language features and general design concepts. You'll put this book down with more knowledge of modular Perl than you had when you picked it up. Whether object-oriented Perl programming is right for your projects is another question-but there's no better decision helper than Conway's guide."

Customer Reviews

More than objects, but a wee bit long in the tooth now
This is a fine book, but the passage of time has rendered some parts of it less relevant.

As an introduction to object oriented programming, and how to do it in Perl, this is one of the best sources you could learn from. Neither The Alpaca nor The Camel do such a good job.

And it's not just objects that are well covered. You'll also find lucid explanations of closures, type globs, the symbol table and tied variables, all of which can be considered advanced Perl.

Elsewhere, though, the material has not aged so well, superseded by the author's own Perl Best Practices, where some of the recommendations have been reversed, or improved upon ('inside out' classes, for example, as implemented in Class::Std, is a superior development of the flyweight approach mentioned in this book). Some of the material, which concentrates on CPAN modules, and the experimental pseudohashes is not so useful in the light of this - the latter are on course to be removed in Perl 5.10. The sections on building objects using references to things other than hashes (e.g. arrays, regular expressions and subroutines) is clever, but this reader was unconvinced of their utility.

There's also coverage of generics, although in Perl this is not much like generics in C# or Java, basically passing around Perl code as uninterpolated text strings and then evaling it inside a subroutine, where any lexical values are interpolated.

Finally, there are chapters on multimethods (no more elegant or manageable in Perl than other languages that support this feature, alas) and persistence.

The principles discussed remain relevant, and the book is a pleasure to read. However, if you already familiar with OOP and just want to get going as fast as possible, the relevant chapters of Intermediate Perl and Perl Best Practices might be better places to look.

Amazing style and clarity
I am a newbie to perl and I'm writing an application that involves using object-oriented perl. I have not seen any other book that explains difficult concepts with amazing clarity that even a newbie like me can understand. I wish other perl books were written as simple and clear like this one :(

An excellent catch all
I have written a number of modules for Perl over the last 5 years, and I really wish I had bought this book earlier.

It is a mixture of sound coding practices and great examples. I actually bought this after reading Perl Best Practices by the same author, and have not been disappointed.

This is a book written by someone how obviously knows Perl from the inside, and can apply this to real world issues.