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

by Damian Conway (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Perl has always been a powerful and popular programming language, but with its new object capabilities, it can do even more. Written for anyone with a little Perl experience, Damian Conway's Object Oriented Perl provides an invaluable guide to virtually every aspect of object-oriented programming in Perl.

The most notable thing about Object Oriented Perl is Conway's excellent perspective on object-oriented concepts and how they are implemented in Perl. This book does a remarkable job of cutting through traditional jargon and illustrating how basic object-oriented design techniques are handled in Perl. (A useful appendix attests to the author's wide-ranging knowledge, with a comparison of Smalltalk, Eiffel, C++, and Java with Perl, including a summary of object-oriented syntax for each.) This book also features a truly excellent review of basic Perl syntax.

Throughout this text, the author shows you the basics of solid object design (illustrated using classes that model music CDs). Basic concepts like inheritance and polymorphism get thorough and clear coverage. The book also points out common mistakes and provides many tips for navigating the powerful and flexible (yet sometimes tricky) nuances of using Perl objects. For instance, Conway shows how to achieve true data encapsulation in Perl (which generally allows calls across modules) as well as its natural support for generic programming techniques.

He also pays special attention to popular object modules available from CPAN (like Class::MethodmakerK, which simplifies declaring classes) and discusses performance issues and the tradeoff between programming convenience and speed often faced by today's Perl developer. Advanced chapters cover a number of techniques for adding persistence and invoking methods using multiple dispatching.

Filled with syntactic tips and tricks, Object Oriented Perl is a sure bet for any programmer who wants to learn how to use Perl objects effectively. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Perl language review, CPAN, Perl objects, 'blessing' and inheritance, polymorphism, Class::Struct and Class::Methodmaker modules, Perl ties and closures, operator overloading, encapsulation, multiple dispatch, Class::Multimethods, coarse-grained and fine-grained object persistence techniques, performance issues.

From Library Journal
Originally designed as a simple scripting language, Perl is now a full-fledged object-oriented programming language. Conway's guide discusses for experienced Perl programmers object-oriented design concepts and how they work in Perl. For academic and larger public library computer science collections.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 490 pages
• Publisher: Manning Publications (January 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1884777791
• ISBN-13: 978-1884777790
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #273,651 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic addition to your Perl collection, July 14, 2000

By	Douglas Welzel (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The low-level "why" book, October 25, 2003

By	Chuck Robey (Silver Spring, MD) - See all my reviews

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.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perl OOP finally made understandable, July 23, 2000

By	Per Kistler (Zurich, Switzerland) - See all my reviews

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].