Conway D. Object Oriented Perl: A Comprehensive Guide to Concepts and Programming Techniques

Manning, 2000 — 510 p.
This book is about the Laziness — on a grand scale.
It’s about how to create bigger, more robust applications that require less effort to build, less time to debug, fewer resources to maintain, and less trouble to extend.
Specifically, it’s about how to do all that with the object-oriented features of Perl — how those features work and how to make use of the many labor-saving techniques and tricks that they make possible. Presenting these new language features requires only a few chapters (specifically, chapters 3 to 6), but the range of programming styles and idioms they make available would fill several books. This book concentrates on the most useful and powerful ways to use object-oriented Perl.
This book is also about the tremendous flexibility of Perl’s approach to object orientation, and how — in Perl — there’s almost always more than one object-oriented way to solve a given problem. You’ll find that the text revisits a few key examples time and again, extending and re implementing them in various ways. Sometimes those changes will add extra functionality to a previous example; sometimes they’ll merely illustrate an alternative solution with different strengths and limitations.
This book is about helping you to develop new Perl programming skills that scale. Perl is a great language for one-line-stands: ad hoc solutions that are quick, cryptic, and unstructured. But Perl can also be a great language for developing large and complex applications. The only problem is that quick, cryptic, and unstructured is cute in a throw-away script, but not so amus ing in 5,000 or 50,000 lines of application code. Object-oriented programming techniques are in valuable for building large, maintainable, reusable, and comprehensible systems in Perl.
Finally, this book is about how Perl makes object-oriented programming more enjoyable and how object-oriented programming makes Perl more enjoyable too. Life is too short to endure the cultured bondage-and-discipline of Eiffel programming or wrestle the alligators that lurk in the muddy semantics of C++. Object-oriented Perl gives you all the power of those languages (and more!) with few of their tribulations. And, best of all, like regular Perl, it’s fun!