This is a run-through and a review of exercises from Higher-Order Perl, by Mark Jason Dominus, located online at http://hop.perl.plover.com/.
The book was originally published in 2005, and some source code is available elsewhere, but I worked through most of the code here myself. My goal was to set up executable code with all the examples, and have a small library of higher-order functions available to use for solving other problems at the end of the book.
Overall the code is very good, and leads the reader through a number of interesting areas. However, we start to get off the rails at the end of Chapter 8, and the same code is used in Chapter 9, which is not great. The rest of the code in this archive should now run, and can serve as the model for other projects.
I originally found HOP a while back and had always meant to sort through the exercises, not only to get an understanding of the higher-order concepts, but to refresh my Perl skills. We use Perl at work in a certain way but only one person does the coding, which made me nervous about him/her quitting, getting hit by a bus, etc.
Together with the above, the run-through of all the code scratched a number of professional itches, including:
- Working with Git on a daily basis
- Working with Emacs on a daily basis
- Working with a language I know on a daily basis, in a more functional context
Most of the code here is being pushed into git from a Linux cloud server, using command-line tools only and Emacs, together with the emacs.d file found here: https://github.com/purcell.
This is just an additional update, watch this space.