Perl Best Practices

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. Brian Kernighan

Most people recognize that testing and debugging are somehow related; that debugging is the natural consequence of testing, and that testing is a natural tool during debugging.

But, when used correctly, testing and debugging are actually antagonistic: the better your testing, the less you'll need to debug. Better testing habits repay themselves many times over, by reducing the effort required to diagnose, locate, and fix bugs.

Testing and debugging are huge topics, and a single chapter like this can only outline the simplest and most universal practices. For much deeper explorations of the possibilities, see Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook (O'Reilly, 2005), Perl Debugged (Addison Wesley, 2001), and Perl Medic (Addison Wesley, 2004).