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Title: How to write unmaintainable code
Review: I've been programming for a long time, C/C++, some Java, PHP, shell scripts, awk, etc. I needed a way to learn perl fast for a project, and a colleague recommended this book.There's a lot of unreadable unmaintainable perl code out there, and books like this a probably a primary contributor to that. The authors seem to go out of their way to avoid writing clear code, constantly saying things like "well, you could write it this way, but perl programmers consider that a waste of typing," instead preferring to depend on hidden variables and the wide range of default behaviors that are perl.The book is organized in a peculiar way that made it hard to find things: I don't usually expect to find descriptions of control constructs such as loops only in chapters about arrays.I've come to see that its quite possible to write clear maintainable perl, but this book encourages poor coding habits.
