That's kinda how it is here. I thought I was being given a copy of Higher Order Perl, while not understanding or promptly forgetting that I had incurred the responsibility of writing a review. Which is now way late, after far better reviews have already been writtten, and now that you can freely download it from the author's website.
I'll start by giving you the takeaway: Right now, there are two books that a Perl programmer should have and should read and should integrate into their coding style. The first is Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway, and this is there to raise the minimum level of your programs. If you want your code to be readable and reusable, read this book and get it to this level. The other is Higher Order Perl. This is because, while you may be leveraging the Awesome Power of Perl, you don't know the half of it. Mark Jason Dominus knows, and this book tells you.
I first learned about MJD when years ago I was going to defend Perl to my Linux User Group. One of my defense points was from MJD, who said of Norvig's seven features that make Lisp different, Perl shares six. Not that I really used it like that. I saw the bit about fibonacci sequences that shows up here in page 33, coded my own iterative and recursive implementations, became convinced that yes, I see the problem here, and wrote my version that used a hash or array to fix it. I didn't hit the
Memoize part, which is where the awesome power comes in.I knew there was awesome power there for a long time. I just failed to learn about it, because it was beyond what I needed at the time. Until, of course, it became part of what I needed. I needed it because I was creating a stack of horrible copy-and-paste code that really needed a dispatch table. I needed it because I needed a better and more adaptable filesystem spider than I had.
I am, for the first time, going chapter-by-chapter through Higher Order Perl and I like to think that my code will be better for it. I know two programs that's better for it.
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