Perl Best Practices -- 20 years later

[pfaut]

I've been browsing through the monastery using Random Node. I keep coming across references to Perl::Critic. I downloaded it and ran it against some of my perl code.

Perl::Critic seems to base most if its policies on recommendations from Perl Best Practices. I was intrigued as to the rationale behind many of the policies. There is some documentation within the policy files themselves but I thought it might be useful to have the book. I searched for the book and found it was written in 2005 and hasn't been updated.

How relevant is this book 20 years later? The current version at the time of publication was 5.8. Perl has seen many changes over the last 20 years. Do the book's recommendations still apply? Is there much that's outdated due to new features in the language?

I'll probably buy the book anyway since it does appear to contain a lot of wisdom. I'm just curious how much material would need rewriting if a new edition were to be published today based on perl 5.40.

[choroba]

The goal of the book is to make you think about how things should be done, not to give you a one-size-fits-all solution. In this respect, it never gets old.

See Perl::Critic::Community for a revised and modernised set of perlcritic rules, created mostly by the IRC subset of the Perl community.

[swl]

There was a blog series in 2014/2015 where the author worked through many of the PBP recommendations. It's worth scanning through for some alternate viewpoints.

https://blog.laufeyjarson.com/category/pbp/

[eyepopslikeamosquito]

I've added your node to my list of references on this topic : Re: I need perl coding standards (Coding Standards References)

You might find other nodes of interest there.

Update: See also : Re: So what is your Perl book "Trilogy" anyway? (Perl Book References)

[kcott]

G'day pfaut,

"... it was written in 2005 and hasn't been updated."

The book itself hasn't been updated; however, you may be interested in the video "Modern Perl Best Practices" which was released in 2014.

I don't own the video; although, I did watch a preview many years ago. I'm generally happy to recommend anything by TheDamian (Damian Conway's handle on PerlMonks).