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January 29, 2006
Amazing discovery ~ Perl stuff
This is a truly amazing discovery for me.
As it turns out, it is possible to debug Perl threads, forked processes as well as CGI programs. You can even debug modules which have been preloaded, inspect object-oriented Perl stuff and even verify user-defined regular expressions on the fly.
Just to think of all those late night debugging episodes doing it my boring way when I could have saved hours and hours (if not days) by doing it the right Perl way.
To think that I was so naive as to believe I knew most there was to know about Perl.
This fine book (Pro Perl Debugging) has turned out to be a real eye-opener for me.
While not for the light-hearted, any true Perl person worth his or her weight in salt will definitely have to read this book, which I recommend highly.
Posted at 8:52 PM
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4 Comment(s)
The information in this book is indeed very useful. Too bad that quality control has failed horribly. See my use.perl blog on this book for some examples.
Posted by Arjen Laarhoven at January 29, 2006 1:34 PM
I would say that 'failed horribly' is a bit of an unfair exaggeration, as the typos mentioned are pretty minor in my opinion. Sure I found them (slightly) aggravating also but no big deal. So what if "regex" is printed in a monospaced font?! I have rarely come across a good technical first edition Perl book without its share of mistakes. Perl developers who are less perfectionists should see right past these minor typos and appreciate the main concepts instead. By the way, the book has scored quite well amongst reviewers at slashdot as well as at amazon despite those buggy typos.
Posted by Kiffin at January 29, 2006 2:07 PM
It's the combination of the different types of mistakes which make this book feel like a rushed job. Apress is a newcomer on the Perl book market, and rushing books out there at the cost of quality is not good for business. That said, I too have learned some interesting new things from this book, the concepts were not lost on me. But the reading of this book could have been a much less annoying experience.
Also, having lots of bugs in a book about debugging strikes me as ironic.
Posted by Arjen Laarhoven at January 29, 2006 3:25 PM
Yes, I can see what you are getting yet. Ironic it is.
Posted by Kiffin at January 29, 2006 3:26 PM
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