Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

Sometimes confused with the also excellent Programming Pearls, Programming Perl [affiliate link] is quite different. It’s big and well written and well structured. But a lot of books meet those criteria, so in what sense did it have an impact on me?

It’s a technical book that proves that you don’t need to be dry and boring to get the message across. Being “professional” doesn’t mean being humourless.

The book also, bizarrely, includes some philosophy. Or rather, the programming language Perl has a philosophy. There’s more than one way to do it. Make the simple things easy, and the hard things possible. Perl, the language, is a mess because the problem space is also a mess.

I may not do much Perl programming any more, but these are all concepts I can get behind. Many (probably better) developers take pride in a kind of pure minimalism. I do like the idea, but my experience says that purity never survives exposure to the real world. Rather than ignore that, I say embrace it.

Maybe I was always pragmatic rather than a purist, but this book (and the Perl language) refined my thinking.