Is there any sexier topic in software development than software testing? That is, besides game programming, 3D graphics, audio, high-performance clustering, cool websites, et cetera? Okay, so software testing is low on the list. And that's unfortunate, because good software testing can increase your productivity, improve your designs, raise your quality, ease your maintenance burdens, and help to satisfy your customers, coworkers, and managers. Perl has a strong history of automated tests. A very early release of Perl 1.0 included a comprehensive test suite, and it's only improved from there. Learning how Perl's test tools work and how to put them together to solve all sorts of previously intractable problems can make you a better programmer in general. Besides, it's easy to use the Perl tools described to handle all sorts of testing problems that you may encounter, even in other languages. Like all titles in O'Reilly's Developer's Notebook series, this "all lab, no lecture" book skips the boring prose and focuses instead on a series of exercises that speak to you instead of at you. Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook will help you dive right in and: Write basic Perl tests with ease and interpret the results Apply special techniques and modules to improve your tests Bundle test suites along with projects Test databases and their data Test websites and web projects Use the "Test Anything Protocol" which tests projects written in languages other than Perl With today's increased workloads and short development cycles, unit tests are more vital to building robust, high-quality software than ever before. Once mastered, these lessons will help you ensure low-level code correctness, reduce software development cycle time, and ease maintenance burdens. You don't have to be a die-hard free and open source software developer who lives, breathes, and dreams Perl to use this book. You just have to want to do your job a little bit better.

A guide to getting the most out of Perl covers such topics as productivity hacks, user interaction, data munging, working with modules, object hacks, and debugging.

A text focusing on the methods and alternatives for designed TCP/IP-based client/server systems and advanced techniques for specialized applications with Perl. A guide examining a collection of the best third party modules in the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. Topics covered: Perl function libraries and techniques that allow programs to interact with resources over a network. IO: Socket library ; Net: FTP library -- Telnet library -- SMTP library ; Chat problems ; Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) issues ; Markup-language parsing ; Internet Protocol (IP) broadcasting and multicasting.

Programmers who already have basic to intermediate skills in procedural Perl and understand fundamental concepts of object orientation will get a solid understanding of basic and advanced object-oriented Perl. This book clarifies when, where and why to use Perl. Featuring many techniques and tricks, it presents solutions to common programming problem and explains how to combine Perl and C++.

This book offers a collection of 256 guidelines on the art of coding to help you write better Perl code--in fact, the best Perl code you possibly can. The guidelines cover code layout, naming conventions, choice of data and control structures, program decomposition, interface design and implementation, modularity, object orientation, error handling, testing, and debugging. - Publisher

Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a companion volume to Apress’s highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words “at work” suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day-to-day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting. Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone’s feedback, we selected 15 folks who’ve been kind enough to agree to be interviewed: Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo! L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1 Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker

Since development first began on Spring in 2003, there's been a constant buzz about it in Java development publications and corporate IT departments. The reason is clear: Spring is a lightweight Java framework in a world of complex heavyweight architectures that take forever to implement. Spring is like a breath of fresh air to overworked developers.In Spring, you can make an object secure, remote, or transactional, with a couple of lines of configuration instead of embedded code. The resulting application is simple and clean. In Spring, you can work less and go home early, because you can strip away a whole lot of the redundant code that you tend to see in most J2EE applications. You won't be nearly as burdened with meaningless detail. In Spring, you can change your mind without the consequences bleeding through your entire application. You'll adapt much more quickly than you ever could before.Spring: A Developer's Notebook offers a quick dive into the new Spring framework, designed to let you get hands-on as quickly as you like. If you don't want to bother with a lot of theory, this book is definitely for you. You'll work through one example after another. Along the way, you'll discover the energy and promise of the Spring framework.This practical guide features ten code-intensive labs that'll rapidly get you up to speed. You'll learn how to do the following, and more: install the Spring Framework set up the development environment use Spring with other open source Java tools such as Tomcat, Struts, and Hibernate master AOP and transactions utilize ORM solutions As with all titles in the Developer's Notebook series, this no-nonsense book skips all the boring prose and cuts right to the chase. It's an approach that forces you to get your hands dirty by working through one instructional example after another-examples that speak to you instead of at you.