Object Oriented Perl: A Comprehensive Guide to Concepts and Programming Techniques

by Damian Conway

Book Overview

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

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1884777791
• ISBN13: 9781884777790
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Manning Publications
• Length: 490 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

The low-level "why" book

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.

Perl OOP finally made understandable

After five years of perl hacking, and lot's of wondering about OOP in perl, this book finally relieved me. Single classes were never a problem, but multiple inheritance, was. Even in linear inheritance it was not easy to see, where the object data of the superclasses would go. Things are clarified here. The book also explains OOP as such, which is a good for learning or repetition. The author seems to be extraordinarely versatile in perl hacking and shows every detail of sophisticated use of perl OOP. Although the book is perfect, besides the typoos (, but there is an errata page on the www), one wonders, whether perl is the ideal language for object oriented programming. It becomes once more clear, that perl is the most powerful language, but also the most complicated one. If one would apply the "tie()" function regularely, then nobody could read the code any more. Despite that, the book is needed, because perl is now everywhere, and it can only be good to master it.The chapters of the book are: 1.) What you need to know first (an object-orientation primer), 2.) What you need to know second (a Perl refresher), 3.) Getting started, 4.) Blessing arrays and scalars, 5.) Inheritance, 7.) Polymorphism, 8.) Automating class creation, 9.) Ties, 10.) Operator overloading, 11.) Encapsulation, 12.) Genericity, 13.) Multiple dispatch, 14.) Persistent objects, A.) Quick reference guide, B.) What you might know instead [about other OO languages].

A fantastic addition to your Perl collection

I was a bit skeptical when I was first handed a copy of Object Oriented Perl because I tend to be biased toward O'Reilly books. However, after reading it I felt it is one of the best Perl books I have come across. Most Perl books deal with Perl as a scripting language. Conway treats pull like a real development language. He gives the standard introduction to object orientation and objects in Perl and then quickly moves past this to look at some of the unique features of Perl's OO development in Perl. For example, he covers blessing every type of reference possible, why you would want to bless a particular type of reference and what the pros and cons are of each approach. Conway also gives a very thorough coverage of implementating true data encapsulation in Perl and presents several methods for doing so.Another thing that struck me about this book is Conway's attention to detail. In his code samples, he carefully explains why each line was written a certain way. He even notes which version of Perl a certain feature or module first appeared in.All in all, a wonderful book. Even if you have been developing in Perl for a while this book has something to offer.

Exhaustive and illustrative

Conway's Object Oriented Perl is the definitive work on object-oriented Perl programming and will probably remain so for some time (if not indefinitely). It illustrates how to construct all manner of object-oriented frameworks in Perl and aptly demonstrates the wide range of styles that are possible--from simplistic to complex and constrained.My only complaint about this work, which is more of an opinion that isn't relative to its rating, is that I think Perl programs are more beautiful and elegant when they don't embody complex scaffolding of the type that this book so ably describes. I see this book as a Perl counterpart to Coplien's Advanced C++, but in the case of C++, it's possible to bury scaffolding in a library out of sight in a way that isn't quite possible in Perl. I'm not sure how many Perl programmers actually know C++ (my experience is that it's a surprisingly small number) but I think that C++ is a language that tolerates and even demands such complexity in a way that Perl doesn't.One thing for sure--the coverage of objects here is vastly superior to that in the turquoise Camel book (Programming Perl). I'm sorry, but I think the topic deserves more descriptive terminology than "thingy." Conway knows his concepts, knows how to execute them in Perl, and sets them down lucidly and, yes, exhaustively.I'm not sure it's worth it in the long run, but that's just me, and obviously others see architectural tradeoffs differently. Meanwhile, this is an excellent, literate work that enhances both the capabilities of programmers and the stature of Perl. If nothing else, studying it will definitely improve your understanding of the language and idioms of Perl. But I would expect it to be more rewarding than that.

Excellent for intermediate AND advanced programmers

/Object-Oriented Perl/ is miles ahead of any other book on OOP that I've ever seen. It sets a new standard in how concepts of OOP should be explained, and how they should be related to the language that the OOP framework is implemented in.And the best thing about this book is that, on the way to explaining various OOP concepts, it manages to elucidate all sorts of non-OOP advanced programming techniques in Perl. So I recommend this book to anyone who's finished /Learning Perl/ and is looking for what to learn next.It's a surprising achievement, and one that makes this book very worthwhile reading for people who don't even particularly care about OOP!And, conversely, because /Object-Oriented Perl/ touches on so many of the possible approaches to OOP, I think that this book would be interesting to people who are interested in OOP, but not terribly interested in Perl per se.It is, in short, a book of immediate as well as lasting value.