I had occasion to be in a bookstore yesterday, and came across Mark-Jason Dominus’s Higher Order Perl.
Anyone wanting to do functional programming in Perl has to be seriously demented. Such activity is like reproducing the finest paintings of the Renaissance in excrement, using your finger (to paraphrase a well-known Perl author). But let’s set this basic violation of good sense aside.
The book is a rehash, transcribed into Perl, of two classic functional programming texts: Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming, and Bird and Wadler’s Introduction to Functional Programming.
Dominus writes well enough, but I find myself irritated that he has bowdlerised two fine books to render their ideas comprehensible to the hoi polloi. There is much greater depth in the above tomes, along with Schwartz’s Perls of Wisdom, than in this lossily compressed derivative.
Beyond the depth and rigour that HOP deliberately avoids, the Abelson/Sussman and Bird/Wadler books have the additional advantage of introducing two wonderful, underappreciated programming languages with decidely non-Perl-like ways of doing everything. If you’re out to broaden your horizons, why not go the whole way?
[…] Bryan O’Sullivan’s blog: I had occasion to be in a bookstore yesterday, and came across Mark-Jason Dominus’s Higher Order […]