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Perl Essentials: Perl tutorial for IT professionals

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Overview

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Learn Modern Perl by developing an airport search engine

  • Get experience with Perl's programming constructs
  • Write your own unit tested packages which can be used across projects
  • Learn to minimize your work by using CPAN - over 100,000 modules provided by other developers

The exercises are interspersed with a project developing an airport search engine. This project will illustrate how the Perl skills you've acquired enable you to implement sophisticated functionality as a maintainable package with only a moderate amount of coding.

Syllabus

  • Topic 1: Scalars and the Perl Language
    • Creating Perl scripts; the difference between modules and pragma; Scalar variables; the strict and warnings pragma; numbers of different bases; numbers and strings - and casting between the two; string operators - concatenation and repetition; strings and variable interpolation; backquotes; backslash; general string delimiters.
  • Topic 2: Arrays and Lists
    • lists, arrays and their relationship; scalar applied to lists and arrays; undefinedness; list delimiters; joining lists into strings; merging lists; push, pop, shift and unshift; lexical and numerical sort; list range operators; map and grep.
  • Topic 3: Control Flow and Conditionals
    • boolean values - defined, undefined, truth and falsehood; boolean operators - && and || or not!; feature "switch" and implicit variables (and a warning not to use them); foreach, for, if, unless, while, next, last, redo ... until; ternary operators; blocks, lexical variables and global variables.
  • Topic 4: Hashes and Lists
    • creation of hashes using single value, list and fat comma assignment; deletion of a key-value pair; the difference between false, undefined and non-existent values; duplicate keys in list hash assignment; the %ENV hash
  • Topic 5: Subroutines
    • definition and invocation of subroutines; state variable declaration; variable scope; various ways of passing parameters to a subroutine; returning arrays and hashes; passing a hash into a subroutine; using and understanding wantarray
  • Topic 6: References
    • references to arrays, hashes, scalars and subroutines; passing references to subroutines and returning them as values; using sort with the developer's own comparison subroutine; various approaches to passing named parameters to a subroutine; use of the 'ref' operator
  • Topic 7: Data I/O, CLI and Regex matching
    • regex matching and substitution; reading from a file; split and join; greedy vs non-greedy pattern matching; the use of the \L, \U and \E string operators; Perl's grep and regular expressions; using Getopt::Long for a CLI
  • Topic 8: Modules and Unit tests
    • Perl distributions and the directory structure; the @INC array; package inheritance with 'use parent'; CSV parsing; using OO Perl packages; unit testing; using web services; using Exporter to export functions.

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