Table of Contents

Credits; About the Authors; About the Contributors; Acknowledgments; Preface; Why Perl Hacks?; How To Use This Book; How This Book Is Organized; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Safari Enabled; We'd Like to Hear from You; Chapter 1: Productivity Hacks; 1 Add CPAN Shortcuts to Firefox; 2 Put Perldoc to Work; 3 Browse Perl Docs Online; 4 Make the Most of Shell Aliases; 5 Autocomplete Perl Identifiers in Vim; 6 Use the Best Emacs Mode for Perl; 7 Enforce Local Style; 8 Don't Save Bad Perl; 9 Automate Checkin Code Reviews; 10 Run Tests from Within Vim; 11 Run Perl from Emacs; Chapter 2: User Interaction; 12 Use $EDITOR As Your UI; 13 Interact Correctly on the Command Line; 14 Simplify Your Terminal Interactions; 15 Alert Your Mac; 16 Interactive Graphical Apps; 17 Collect Configuration Information; 18 Rewrite the Web; Chapter 3: Data Munging; 19 Treat a File As an Array; 20 Read Files Backwards; 21 Use Any Spreadsheet As a Data Source; 22 Factor Out Database Code; 23 Build a SQL Library; 24 Query Databases Dynamically Without SQL; 25 Bind Database Columns; 26 Iterate and Generate Expensive Data; 27 Pull Multiple Values from an Iterator; Chapter 4: Working with Modules; 28 Shorten Long Class Names; 29 Manage Module Paths; 30 Reload Modified Modules; 31 Create Personal Module Bundles; 32 Manage Module Installations; 33 Presolve Module Paths; 34 Create a Standard Module Toolkit; 35 Write Demos from Tutorials; 36 Replace Bad Code from the Outside; 37 Drink to the CPAN; 38 Improve Exceptional Conditions; 39 Search CPAN Modules Locally; 40 Package Standalone Perl Applications; 41 Create Your Own Lexical Warnings; 42 Find and Report Module Bugs; Chapter 5: Object Hacks; 43 Turn Your Objects Inside Out; 44 Serialize Objects (Mostly) for Free; 45 Add Information with Attributes; 46 Make Methods Really Private; 47 Autodeclare Method Arguments; 48 Control Access to Remote Objects; 49 Make Your Objects Truly Polymorphic; 50 Autogenerate Your Accessors; Chapter 6: Debugging; 51 Find Compilation Errors Fast; 52 Make Invisible Characters Apparent; 53 Debug with Test Cases; 54 Debug with Comments; 55 Show Source Code on Errors; 56 Deparse Anonymous Functions; 57 Name Your Anonymous Subroutines; 58 Find a Subroutine's Source; 59 Customize the Debugger; Chapter 7: Developer Tricks; 60 Rebuild Your Distributions; 61 Test with Specifications; 62 Segregate Developer and User Tests; 63 Run Tests Automatically; 64 See Test Failure Diagnostics — in Color!; 65 Test Live Code; 66 Cheat on Benchmarks; 67 Build Your Own Perl; 68 Run Test Suites Persistently; 69 Simulate Hostile Environments in Your Tests; Chapter 8: Know Thy Code; 70 Understand What Happens When; 71 Inspect Your Data Structures; 72 Find Functions Safely; 73 Know What's Core and When; 74 Trace All Used Modules; 75 Find All Symbols in a Package; 76 Peek Inside Closures; 77 Find All Global Variables; 78 Introspect Your Subroutines; 79 Find Imported Functions; 80 Profile Your Program Size; 81 Reuse Perl Processes; 82 Trace Your Ops; 83 Write Your Own Warnings; Chapter 9: Expand Your Perl Foo; 84 Double Your Data with Dualvars; 85 Replace Soft References with Real Ones; 86 Optimize Away the Annoying Stuff; 87 Lock Down Your Hashes; 88 Clean Up at the End of a Scope; 89 Invoke Functions in Odd Ways; 90 Glob Those Sequences; 91 Write Less Error-Checking Code; 92 Return Smarter Values; 93 Return Active Values; 94 Add Your Own Perl Syntax; 95 Modify Semantics with a Source Filter; 96 Use Shared Libraries Without XS; 97 Run Two Services on a Single TCP Port; 98 Improve Your Dispatch Tables; 99 Track Your Approximations; 100 Overload Your Operators; 101 Learn from Obfuscations; Colophon;

chromatic is the technical editor of the O'Reilly Network, where he edits Perl.com, ONLamp.com, and the Linux and Security dev centers. He is also the author of the Extreme Programming Pocket Guide, Running Weblogs with Slash, and Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook as well as the editor of BSD Hacks and Gaming Hacks. He is the original author of Test::Builder, the foundation for most modern testing modules in Perl 5, and has contributed many of the tests for core Perl. He has given tutorials and presentations at several Perl conferences, including OSCON.

Dr. Damian Conway is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), where he teaches object-oriented software engineering. He is an effective teacher, an accomplished writer, and the author of several popular Perl modules. He is also a semi-regular contributor to the Perl Journal. In 1998 he was the winner of the Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility for two modules (Getopt::Declare and Lingua::EN::Inflect) and in 1999 he won his second "Larry" for his Coy.pm haiku-generation module.

Curtis (Ovid) Poe is a CPAN author, a TPF Steering Committee Member, and the TPF Grant Committee Secretary. He likes long walks on the beach and single malt scotch, but hates writing bios. Ovid writes for Perl.com too.