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Higher-Order Perl Available For Free Download

Posted by kdawson on from the virtual-special-shelf dept.

Christopher Cashell writes "As noted on Perlbuzz, Mark Jason Dominus's amazing book, Higher-Order Perl, is now available for free download. This is a great book that goes way beyond your normal programming reference. This will change the way you look at programs, and make you a better programmer in any language. It sits on that special shelf reserved for books like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, The C Programming Language, and The Practice of Programming."

15 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. amazing by gizmo_mathboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It is truly awesome that mjd is making this available for free.

    It's still worth buying the dead tree version, though.

    1. Re:amazing by Basilius · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Particularly since the links on the site go to Powell's.

      Powell's is freaking cool. And independent, if you care about such things. (And, for that matter, even if you don't.

  2. Re:The origin of PERL by speculatrix · · Score: 4, Funny

    a good programmer can write a script which does the same thing whether run in perl or executed as sendmail.cf

  3. Re:The origin of PERL by condition-label-red · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...and both are equally readable!

    --
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
  4. Re:How *do* they do that? by dfay · · Score: 2, Funny

    Nope, sorry -unlike peanut butter and chocolate, downloads don't mix with bookshelves.

    Interestingly, they can both be measured in the same units. (meaning Libraries of Congress, of course.)

  5. COBOL Zombies by cjfs · · Score: 2, Funny

    He's just welcoming our new Zombie Overlords

    .

  6. Higher Order Perl by russlar · · Score: 2, Funny

    All programs written in higher-order perl start with the following line:
    #!/usr/bong/perl

    --
    Anybody want my mod points?
  7. Re:SICP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you can tell me why Perl is so popular, I think I can answer your question. It seems pretty clear that there is a large intersection between "people who love Perl" and "people who never had exposure to functional programming".

  8. Perl Jobs by theredshoes · · Score: 2, Informative

    Thank you for the link, I am downloading the book and I will probably pour over it on my Christmas break. I don't think Perl is dead, there are jobs in my city with some high profile companies that need Perl developers. Just my two cents. I am not sure about other cities though.

    1. Re:Perl Jobs by Wee · · Score: 3, Informative

      Perl has, in some small way, kept me continuously employed for the last 14 years. It's really pretty surprising the utility and longevity it has.

      -B

      --

      Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.

    2. Re:Perl Jobs by jonadab · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Perl is also very useful in a lot of jobs that don't list "Perl" specifically in the job description. I don't know how a network administrator could survive without it, for instance. You'd constantly find yourself spending hours to do a ten-minute job.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
    3. Re:Perl Jobs by Haeleth · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Python isn't a very good language for quick-and-dirty scripting, and it's often not installed at all by default. It's a pretty good general-purpose programming language, but that's a different matter entirely. Perl, in comparison, is ubiquitous on pretty much all Unix-like platforms, and is well adapted for things like one-off one-liners.

      More relevantly to this thread, Perl is a better language for FP than Python is. Perl has full support for anonymous closures (Python's lambdas are very weak by comparison), and Perl has proper predictable lexical scoping (Python's scoping rules are rather strange). This all reflects the different design goals of the languages. Python is built on the principle that there should be only one way to achieve any goal -- and in practice that's usually objects. Perl is built on the principle that the programmer should have loads of options to choose from -- and hence it supports several programming paradigms equally well.

  9. too late by museumpeace · · Score: 2, Funny

    I bought the book quite a while back. And I wouldn't expect them to publish it with the title it should have: how to write perl so well you look like you are using python.

    --
    SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
  10. wiki? by gbjbaanb · · Score: 2

    From TFA:

    You may remember I wanted to turn the book into a wiki. That would have been awesome. But the book's fourth anniversary is coming up this spring and I have to admit to myself that I'm not gonna get the wiki together. So I'm posting the thing already.

    So, perhaps if he put a bare wiki up, everyone could c&p a page at a time?

  11. Re:How *do* they do that? by tlhIngan · · Score: 2, Funny

    Funny, I would have thought it sat on a hard drive or a usb key or something ...

    "You have downloads on my bookshelf!"
    "You have bookshelves on my downloads!"

    Nope, sorry -unlike peanut butter and chocolate, downloads don't mix with bookshelves.

    Thankfully, there are many devices in this nice modern day and age that can convert downloads into books, and likewise, there are devices that can take books and turn them into downloads. I think someone created a whole movement around the former device when he couldn't get it to work "properly", and a large company got sued when they did the latter, even though they made it very difficult to get whole books that way.