Mastering Perl (2nd Edition)

There are many introductory Perl books, but few that guide you through the "second step." Mastering Perl fills exactly the gap between introductory books and expert experience: when you can write scripts but stare blankly at someone else's legacy code, this book tells you where to start. Its greatest strength is its strong engineering flavor. It discusses how to debug, how to locate performance bottlenecks, how to use benchmarks to judge whether optimization is worthwhile, how to use Perl::Critic to make code conform to shared standards, how to patch third-party modules without changing the original code, and how to turn errors and logs into diagnosable information. These problems arise in any real Perl project, yet are rarely covered systematically in tutorials. The 2nd edition adds and updates a large amount of chapter content, introduces newer tools such as Sereal and MessagePack in the data persistence and logging sections, and the "problem-solving guide" in the appendix is also quite practical. The author, brian d foy, is the maintainer of the core Perl documentation perlfaq and publisher of The Perl Review; he habitually shares practical successes and failures in the first person, so reading it feels like listening to a veteran recount experience. Note that the book assumes you already know basic Perl syntax and that you will consult documentation and verify things yourself; it does not explain every function step by step. For readers used to tutorial-style instruction, it is more like a "workbook" to keep by your desk and consult repeatedly.