[prog] Perl advice

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 11:42:11AM +0100, Dan wrote:
> I run the LinuxChix Perl course, and I'm close to wrapping it up now.
> Does anyone have some words of wisdom to offer beginners?

"There's more than one way to do it" (grin)
 
Always check on CPAN to see if there's a module that's already been
written which does what you want.

However, that being said, if you're writing a module that you think you
might put up on CPAN, try not to have it depend on lots of modules.

Less is more.  Better to write two small modules which do something
well, than a whole kitchen-sink which does lots of things that not
everybody may want.

A concrete example of this: somebody wrote a module for converting RGB
colours into HSV colours and suchlike -- but they did it as part of a 
suite of modules related to PDF generation.  All *I* was interested in
was the colour conversion (because I wanted to use it for a script for
generating colour schemes for X Window managers).  So I begged the
author of the PDF suite to split it out as a separate, independent
module, and he did.

Kathryn Andersen
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