Visual Modeling with IBM Rational Software Architect and UML (DeveloperWorks Series) Book

I'm having to learn Perl for work, so after reading the official Perl documentation and reading a lot of threads on perlmonks, I eventually came across this book and spent some time at work reading it. It was quite interesting and definitely a very welcome change from my usual job of doing maintenance on shoddy CRUD web apps. Unfortunately, I don't think the techniques I've learnt from this book are going to be of much use dealing with the Perl legacy system I'm having to work on, which is another one of those shoddy CRUD web apps.

None of the ideas in this book were particularly new to me---recursion, iterators, higher-order functions, lazy evaluation, parsing, linear algebra---but what was new to me was seeing lots of examples of these ideas being turned into code in a concrete (and not particularly fancy, somewhat awkward) programming language. This probably has significantly increased my ability to be able to apply these ideas when programming in the future. If I ever manage to find a job which isn't just about doing maintenance on shoddy legacy CRUD web apps.

I guess the main flaw of this book is that at heart it's a book on programming in general, but because the programming language is Perl and Perl is a language with a lot of idiosyncrasies and arguable flaws, anybody who isn't looking to program in Perl specifically is probably going to be put off by the use of Perl. For me, this wasn't a problem as I was looking to program in Perl specifically.