Modern Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway

Summary: Highly recommended

Whether you want to watch this video heavily depends on how much Perl do you use, and how much do you appreciate good advices.

If you work with Perl on day to day basis, and you want to improve by applying some of the good practices, really consider this one. Damian Conway goes over variety of topics here and presents best practices. Of course the term best is heavily biassed here, as author shows what is the best in his opinion. It not always must be the case, but still, huge part of the video shows you really good practices, while remaining one presents almost best practices.

What is really worth to watch is the approach to certain topics and, to my surprise, some of the ideas can be easily adapted to Python as well. Of course you can’t get them directly, but concepts and ideas are really worth taking them into Python instead of Perl. This, for example refers to hash map manipulations, passing arbitrary number of arguments via dictionary, naming conventions, data layout in the code, code formatting and documentation, etc. Even though you won’t be able to apply these rules directly, you will be still able to follow them.

As for perl itself, there were few surprises in the video that caught my attention (I am just a casual perl developer). I was caught by some builtins (e.g. enumeration), I was surprised by some conventions that can do you lots of harm when incorrectly used (e.g. scalar vs. list context), and in general it was real eye-opener in many cases (but that might be the result of my rather reduced activity when it comes to day to day usage of language).

If you ask about lecture delivery, video quality, and material preparation – they are simply top-notch.

As for the best practices themselves, these are not defined by simple set of rules, but your attitude towards excellence in what you do – as Damian points out at the end.

Highly recommended.