Perl 5 Essential Training

Learn Perl 5. This course covers the basics of Perl scripting, using up-to-date "Modern Perl" standards.

Introduction

• Welcome
• Exercise files

1. Setting Up

• Installing Komodo for Mac OS X
• Installing Perl and Komodo for Windows
• About Perl

2. Quick Start

• About the quick start
• Hello World
• Counting lines in a file
• Loops and conditionals
• Functions
• Using perldoc

3. Basic Syntax

• Anatomy of a Perl script
• Statements and expressions
• Assignments
• Whitespace and comments
• Blocks and scope

4. Values and Variables

• Understanding values and variables
• Numeric variables
• Character strings
• Logical values
• Lists and arrays
• Slices of arrays
• Hashes or associative arrays
• Constants

5. Conditionals

• The if statement
• Else and elsif
• Negative conditionals with unless
• Switch with given and when
• The ternary conditional operator

6. Loops

• Understanding loops
• Loops with while and until
• Iterating with for
• Iterating with foreach
• Loop control statements

7. Special Variables

• The default variable
• Function arguments
• The autoflush variable
• The system error variable
• Other special variables

8. Operators

• About Perl's operators
• Basic arithmetic operators
• Compound assignment operators
• Relational operators
• Logical operators
• File test operators
• The range operator
• The string concatenation operator
• Quote operators

9. Regular Expressions

• About regular expressions
• Matching text
• Common modifiers
• Extracting matches
• Getting a list of matches
• Simple matches
• Matching wildcards
• Matching classes of characters
• Matching metacharacters
• Search and replace
• Splitting strings

10. Functions

• Understanding functions
• Defining and calling functions
• Calling a function with arguments
• Locally scoped variables
• Returning values
• Static variables
• Predeclared functions

11. References and Structures

• Understanding values and references
• Array references
• Hash references
• Function references
• Finding the type of a reference
• Mixed data structures

12. File I/O

• Understanding streams and files
• Using file handles
• Using the OO interface for files
• Working with binary files

13. Built-In Functions

• The print() and say() functions
• The die() function
• String functions
• Numeric functions
• List and array functions
• Time functions
• The undef function

14. Modules

• Leveraging code with modules
• Perl's object model
• An example module
• Using Carp for error messages

15. Best Practices

• Be consistent
• Selective use of comments and whitespace
• Use strict and warnings
• Use constants

Conclusion

• Next steps