Rohan Almeida’s Blog
Perl Developer. Linux Advocacy. Practicing Guitarist.

In spite of programming in Perl for the past eight years, I’m not sure how I missed this book.
Extreme Programming in Perl is a wonderful book which teaches you about XP with a focus on Perl. I came upon this website during some Google searches I ran for a Perl programming problem I was facing. I really wish I had come upon this book a few years earlier, but no complaints!

The author does a superb job of keeping the narrative real. The book explains the four core values of XP: Communication, Simplicity, Feedback and Courage in an easy-to-digest manner and does not stray away with high or dense ideals. So yes, it does feel like you’re getting instruction, but thats the best way IMO. I remember a short story by Stephen King about a young boy and his Grand Father who is terminal. The boy asks for some advice about life and stuff. The old man looks at him and says - “I don’t give advice, only instruction”. Beautiful!

Adopting XP can be a problem which should be dealt with delicately though. From what I’ve digested so far, I think having a strong functional and unit test suite is a nice way to begin.

Another gem would be what the author says about Simplicity - do the absolute minimum necessary to solve the problem first, and then the design actually begins when you start to refactor the current code into the codebase.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Perl. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.