Best Tool for the Job
By Eugene E. Kim
Perl is often described as a "Swiss Army chain saw" because of its tremendous versatility. That can be a wonderful trait, but when you're trying to find the most effective way to do something, it can be more of a burden than a boon.
In Data Munging with Perl, David Cross focuses on Perl's most common application: manipulating and transforming data. He not only lists the language's many capabilities for "munging" data, but also explains when and where to use each capability.
The Why and the How
Perl is a highly idiomatic language, which makes it well suited for data processing. Cross spends ample time discussing the language's unique syntax. It's important to fully understand the costs and benefits of these various idioms so that you can apply them effectively in your own applications.
For example, Perl's syntax makes it easy to write sort functions, but at the cost of performance. If the performance overhead grows too large, the ease of writing Perl sort routines loses value, because those routines won't perform the job effectively.
Data Munging with Perl
By David Cross
Manning, 2000, 283 pp.
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