Perl 5 Programming Introduction

• Perl strengths: flexible, fast, rich, easy-to-use operator set
• Reusable tool building for system admin, text manipulation and the Internet
• Networking, text filtering, web application programming

Running Perl programs

• Invoking UNIX/Linux scripts with #! syntax
• Starting Perl scripts under Windows via command line

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

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

Managing files and user input

• Handling standard I/O streams
• Parsing command-line arguments
• Reading and writing data files

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
• Making decisions with logical operators
• Establishing and using ranges

Perl support for conventional flow control constructs

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

Perl-specific constructs

• if and unless as statement modifiers
• Constructing switch statements

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

Common data manipulation requirements

• String functions for text manipulation
• Processing arrays with list functions
• Arranging information with sort

I/O and tool building

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

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

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