Laufeyjarson writes…

The suggestion here is to place a semicolon after every statement.  I agree with this, even if it isn’t technically needed.  The only place I’ll skip it is if it is a function returning a constant value, and that’s all that is in the function, like this: (more…)

PBP says to put whitespace around binary operators.  This, I entirely agree with.  It also notes to keep unary operators together with their operand.  This, too, I think is a good idea. (more…)

The PBP suggests putting whitespace between keys or indices and their brackets.
I find this a good suggestion, although I forget to do it sometimes.  I do it for all complex statements, but forget for simple cases.
This is a place perltidy is a big help.

The suggestion in this section is not to use parenthesis for builtins and builtin-like functions.
I’m not sure why differentiating between builtins and functions is particularly useful, but I don’t object to the idea and found it easy to get used to.

The item in this category is not to separate the parenthesis from a function call by a space.  This is sort of the converse of the last practice, and needed to help show a function call from a control structure.

I find this good advice, too, for the reasons given.

The PBP suggests putting a space between a keyword and the opening parenthesis, to help differentiate it from a subroutine call.
This is a good idea, for good reasons.

The PBP suggests the venerable K&R bracer style.  I don’t have a strong feeling on this.
I have used several styles over the years, and mildly prefer the Allman style, which the book calls BSD.  I find the GNU style of half-indents bizarre.

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Most people who use Perl seriously have seen Damian Conway‘s book Perl Best Practices.  It was, and is, an important book and has a lot of interesting discussions in it.

I don’t find all the suggestions in PBP to be useful, though.  Since I’ve just been thinking about them, I thought I’d write them up.  Why not go through them all?
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