Introduction to Perl 5 Programming Training

Introduction to Perl 5 Programming Course Outline

• Introduction to Perl

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

• Perl Syntax Fundamentals

  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

• 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
  • 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/elsif
  • Creating loops with do, while, until, for and foreach

  Perl-specific constructs

  • if and unless as statement modifiers
  • 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

• Built-in and Add-on Functions

  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

• 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

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