Introduction to Perl

• Perl strengths: ease of programming with operators, flexibility, execution speed
• Reusable tool building for system admin, text manipulation, the Internet
• Popular application areas: networking, text filtering, Web application programming

Perl Syntax Fundamentals

Running Perl programs

• Invoking Perl scripts under UNIX/Linux with "shebang" syntax
• Starting Perl scripts under Win32 via command line associations
• Getting help with perldoc

Variable types and contexts

• Scalars vs. lists vs. hashes
• Strings and interpolated strings
• Making sense of special variables
• Working in the right context

Compound data structures

• Generating references to named variables
• Creating references to anonymous data
• Building multidimensional arrays
• Working with multidimensional hashes

Managing files and user input

• Handling standard I/O streams
• Defining and using file handles
• Parsing command line arguments
• Reading and writing data files

Pattern Matching and Operators

Perl regular expressions

• Extracting important text information
• Building on UNIX regular expressions
• Altering data with substitutions
• Performing global and case-insensitive matches

Perl's small operator groups

• Manipulating arithmetic expressions
• Replicating and growing strings
• Saving time with assignment operators
• Obtaining file attributes
• Making decisions with logical operators
• Establishing and using ranges

Looping, Decisions and Flow Control

Perl support for conventional flow control constructs

• Making decisions with if/else/elseif
• Creating loops with do, while, until, for and foreach

Perl-specific constructs

• if and unless as statement modifiers
• Altering flow with next and last
• Constructing switch statements

Subroutines

Writing subroutines

• Defining and calling a subroutine
• Passing and receiving parameters
• Returning values to the caller

Making data work for you

• Localising variables: my and local
• Accessing global variables
• Extracting local variables with shift

Built-in and Add-on Functions

Common data manipulation requirements

• String functions for text manipulation
• Processing arrays with list functions
• Arranging information with sort
• Sorting data on multiple fields

I/O and tool building

• Manipulating file system entries
• Reading binary files
• Dissecting and creating records with split and join
• Formatting tabular output

Perl and Object Orientation

How Perl implements object orientation

• An introduction to OO in Perl
• Methods, classes and constructors
• Surveying and obtaining third-party packages from CPAN

Accessing OO packages

• How to use use
• Defining a schema to employ OO modules
• Calling methods with the -> syntax
• Passing initialisation parameters