Higher Order Perl (Paperback)

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• This item: Higher Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus

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Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway 5.0 out of 5 stars (4)  £20.14

Mastering Perl by brian foy 4.5 out of 5 stars (2)  £20.14

Perl Hacks: Tips & Tools for Programming, Debugging, and Surviving by Damian Conway 5.0 out of 5 stars (2)  £15.99

Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook (Developers Notebook) by Ian Langworth 4.0 out of 5 stars (1)  £13.62

Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing) by W.Richard Stevens 4.7 out of 5 stars (3)  £45.89

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Review
"It's well written.everyone who claims to be an expert ought to read it.these techniques allow programmers to accomplish far more than they're used to."
—Gregory V. Wilson, Dr. Dobb's Journal, November 2005

"It is, quite simply, one of the best books on programming I have read for a long time."—Martin Schweitzer, Computing Reviews, Association for Computing Machinery, July 2005

"Mark Jason Dominus has hit his mark with Higher Order Perl. It is a very informative book that is a must read for Perl programmers who want to take their skills to the next level."
—Mark Rutz, Linux Journal, November 2005



"Higher-Order Perl is one of the Perl books that should have a place on the bookshelf of every Perl programmer. It offers an in-depth understanding of important programming techniques and fundamental concepts. The chapter on parsing alone is worth the price of this book. I do not know a better text about parsing in Perl."
—Reinhard Voglmaier, Unix Review, November 2005



"Higher-Order Perl is the most exciting, most clearly-written, most comprehensive, and most forward-looking programming book I've read in at least ten years. It's your map to the future of programming in any language."
—Sean M. Burke, Leading Programmer, Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN)

"There are lots of book that teach you new Perl modules or techniques. This book goes beyond that and teaches a new way to think about Perl programming."
—Peter Norvig, Google Inc.



"As a programmer, your bookshelf is probably overflowing with books that did nothing to change the way you program. . . or think about programming.

You're going to need a completely different shelf for this book.

While discussing caching techniques in Chapter 3, Mark Jason Dominus points out how a large enough increase in power can change the fundamental way you think about a technology. And that's precisely what this entire book does for Perl.

It raids the deepest vaults and highest towers of Computer Science, and transforms the many arcane treasures it finds--recursion, iterators, filters, memoization, partitioning, numerical methods, higher-order functions, currying, cutsorting, grammar-based parsing, lazy evaluation, and constraint programming--into powerful and practical tools for real-world programming tasks: file system interactions, HTML processing, database access, web spidering, typesetting, mail processing, home finance, text outlining, and diagram generation.

Along the way it also scatters smaller (but equally invaluable) gems, like the elegant explanation of the difference between 'scope' and 'duration' in Chapter 3, or the careful exploration of how best to return error flags in Chapter 4. It even has practical tips for Perl evangelists.

Dominus presents even the most complex ideas in simple, comprehensible ways, but never compromises on the precision and attention to detail for which he is so widely and justly admired.

His writing is—as always—lucid, eloquent, witty, and compelling.

Aptly named, this truly is a Perl book of a higher order, and essential reading for every serious Perl programmer."
—Damian Conway, Co-designer of Perl 6



"Higher-Order Perl is a terrific book targeted at the advanced Perl programmer with a significant computer science background. The tone, content, and code make Higher-Order Perl memorable; the knowledge, wisdom, and intuition it provides make it a book any Perl programmer should aim to understand and digest in full."."
—Teodor Zlatanov, Programmer, Gold Software Systems

Product Description
Most Perl programmers were originally trained as C and Unix programmers, so the Perl programs that they write bear a strong resemblance to C programs. However, Perl incorporates many features that have their roots in other languages such as Lisp. These advanced features are not well understood and are rarely used by most Perl programmers, but they are very powerful. They can automate tasks in everyday programming that are difficult to solve in any other way. One of the most powerful of these techniques is writing functions that manufacture or modify other functions. For example, instead of writing ten similar functions, a programmer can write a general pattern or framework that can then create the functions as needed according to the pattern. For several years Mark Jason Dominus has worked to apply functional programming techniques to Perl. Now Mark brings these flexible programming methods that he has successfully taught in numerous tutorials and training sessions to a wider audience.

* Introduces powerful programming methods—new to most Perl programmers—that were previously the domain of computer scientists
* Gradually builds up confidence by describing techniques of progressive sophistication
* Shows how to improve everyday programs and includes numerous engaging code examples to illustrate the methods

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First Sentence
Until the release of Perl 5.6.0, there was no good way to generate a binary numeral in Perl. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index

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3 Reviews 5 star:  (3) 4 star:    (0) 3 star:    (0) 2 star:    (0) 1 star:    (0)           Average Customer Review 5.0 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews   3 of 3 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Functional Programming meets Perl, this is something special, 4 Aug 2007 By  Thing with a hook - See all my reviews In a book market awash with teach-yourself-in-x-time-units, cookbooks, and API tutorials, Higher-Order Perl is ambitious. It attempts to bring functional techniques to Perl, leaning heavily on two language features: closures, and functions as first-class entities. To enjoy this book you need to be completely comfortable with Perl's syntax, there's lots of code to read and digest, and if you can't follow it, you're going to get lost very quickly, because there are lots of new concepts going to be thrown your way. There's no outlandish symbol table hacking, almost no object orientation, not even much use of modules, but it is in a very different style to most of the Perl you're used to. If, like me, most of the programming languages you're familiar with are more closely related to C than Lisp, this is going to be a challenging read. It's going to take you a long time to get through this book, and it'll probably require re-reading (more than once) to fully get it all. This is a book bursting at the seams with ideas, beginning with recursion, and then onto caching, iterators, streams and currying. The last two chapters show how to apply these techniques to parsing and declarative programming, and they feel like mini books in themselves. Applications of the code range from classics like Tower of Hanoi, Fibonacci sequences and the Newton Raphson method, to more practical material including databases, tied files, and directory walking. Part of the reason I enjoyed this book so much may be because I have no formal training in Computer Science, and of course, the likes of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and The Little Schemer contain similar concepts. But for someone without functional programming experience it's great to have it in Perl. Lispniks, MLers and Haskellites may well be familiar with these ideas already, but they should consider this an enticing 'gateway book' for Perl programmers. And Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell just isn't as well-written as HOP. There's no hiding from the fact that if you want to fully appreciate the material here, you're going to have to work hard at it, but Mark Jason Dominus does a great job at stopping things from feeling like a textbook, and knows how to inject some wit into the proceedings without being distracting. Full marks to Morgan Kaufmann for the layout and overall production quality, too. I keep The Camel, Perl Cookbook and Perl Best Practices on my desk when programming Perl. HOP is not going to be joining them (yet), it's not that sort of a book. Instead it's a very different intellectual pleasure and easily one of my favourite and most important Perl books (only PBP edges it out due to the latter's everyday practicality). If you're serious about Perl, you need to read this book. If you're serious about programming, ditto. Hell, this might just be a good enough reason to learn Perl if you don't already (admittedly, the chances of such a person reading this far are small). HOP has set the bar very high. Python and Ruby authors, please step up! Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   2 of 2 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars A Well Chosen Title!, 26 Jul 2007 By  Daniel Otterburn (West Yorkshire, UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    As the title suggests, this book is about advancing your programming techniques in Perl and is definitely not for the beginner. I had used some of the techniques before, though largely without being fully aware of the "theory", but most were either entirely new to me or concepts that I had previously considered to be the domain of the true guru (and well out of my reach). And this despite being a professional Perl programmer for over 4 years! Mark Jason Dominus works carefully through a number of well explained examples, illustrating how and why each technique should or could be implemented, and developing each example as the book progresses. Though I found myself frequently having to re-read his often terse code examples and though I cannot claim to have understood _every_ techinque well enough to implement it, I have found that I have used at least one of the techniques he describes in almost every script or module I have written since I finsihed the first chapter! I would say that this book is an absolute must for any serious Perl programmer who does not already consider him or herself to be at guru status. Buy it, read it, understand it (eventually) and become a better programmer! (It occurs to me that for those with a more formal training in Computer Science, the techniques described may not be quite a revelatory as they were for me, however the implementation examples in Perl will still, undoubtedly, be extremely useful.) Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)   5.0 out of 5 stars File this book next to your copy of Knuth, 19 Mar 2008 By  D. Brennan (Marlbrough, Wiltshire England) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    I echo all the reviews so far this book is all about the "Art" of computer programming, and as such is comparable to Knuth's work, than the usual Cookbook. Its always great when a book teaches you things that you have forgotten or don't know. The description of Scope, Duration and Lexical closure in chapter 3, wakes you up to the fact that just because this language looks like C its not C. Perl is a language that I use all the time, as its very easy to build stuff that works. This book makes you think about some of the stuff that you have produced over the years, and wonder if you could have done better. Mark Dominus and friends have reminded us that programming is not just about function, but is about style, method and art. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this) Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review › See all 3 customer reviews...		Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews

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