Writing Perl Modules for CPAN

One thing that makes a great programming book for me is how enjoyable it is to read from start to finish, as a reference, or just fun reading, where I just flip open to any page and read whatever I find there. Sam Tregar's book fits all of the above. Some books make you say to yourself, 'it's important stuff I should know, but I'll take a look at it later' and they usually put you to sleep after a page or two. Not this one! I cannot wait to get back to reading it and re-reading and then downloading modules and their docs for more reading and then I can't wait to put it all to use. I was even driving with it in my hand this morning with my finger in the last chapter (CGI Application Modules for CPAN) hoping for some long red lights so I could read another paragraph or two. I highly recommend this book to all Perl programmers.

I found the style of this book very readable and friendly, covering the main idea behind the book (writing CPAN Modules), as well as being informative about Perl best practices and an insight into some great CPAN Modules.

I just finished reading Sam Tregar's book, and found a lot of things I liked about it. It's very readable, describes the stuff you need to know to write modules. I really liked his coverage of Inline and of CGI::Application, two facets of module writing that haven't gotten enough coverage.

This charming book provides an extensive overview on pretty much everything you need to know to write a Perl module, prepare it for CPAN and submit it into the wild.It's amazing how much this book covers: Not only does Sam Tregar show how object-oriented Perl modules are architected, how to write regression test suites, how to extend Perl modules with C code, but he gets also the community aspects right -- how does your module get really popular? You can tell that Sam is a successful Perl module author himself.Now, on every single one of these topics one could have written another 300-page book, of course. But the charming aspect of the book is that, while it doesn't go into each and every detail, it provides an excellent overview to future module authors. The printing is quite anarchic, though, with low-budget drawings and some typos which could have been caught easily by a thorough proof-reader, but it's tolerable, it's like watching a low-budget film by a very talented young director.If that's not enough, I found the last chapter of the book invaluable, covering the CGI::Application module, which enables authors to share popular CGI-flows (e.g. bulletin boards) on CPAN.I can whole-heartedly recommend this book to every prospective CPAN author -- there's hardly any coverage of this topic anywhere in the Perl literature besides the somewhat scattered online documentation. Buy it today!