Perl Programming Essentials

1. An overview of Perl

• What is Perl?
• Perl is compiled and interpreted
• Perl Advantages and Disadvantages
• Downloading and Installing Perl
• Which version of Perl
• Getting Help

2. Creating and running Perl programs

• Structure of a Perl program
• Running a Perl script
• Checking syntax and warnings
• Execution of scripts under UNIX and Windows

3. Basic Data and I/O

• Numeric and Text literals
• Math operators and expressions
• Scalar variables
• Default values
• Writing to standard output
• Command line arguments
• Reading from the standard input

4. Logic and Loops

• About flow control
• The if statement and Boolean values
• Using unless and elsif
• Statement modifiers
• warn() and die()
• The conditional construct
• Using while loop and its variants
• Using the for loop
• Exiting from loops

5. Lists and Arrays

• The list data type
• Accessing array elements
• Creating arrays
• List interpolation
• Arrays and memory
• Counting elements
• Iterating through an array
• List evaluation
• Slices and ranges

6. Reading and writing text files

• File I/O Overview
• Opening a file
• Reading text files
• Writing to a text file
• Arrays and file I/O
• Using the <> operator

7. List functions

• Growing and shrinking arrays
• The split() function
• Splitting on whitespace
• Assigning to literal lists
• The join() function
• The sort() function
• Alternate sort keys
• Reversing an array

8. Formatting output

• Using sprintf() and printf()
• Report formatting overview
• Defining report formats
• The write() function
• Advanced filehandle magic

9. Hashes

• Hash overview
• Creating hashes
• Hash attributes
• Traversing a hash
• Testing for existence of elements
• Deleting hash elements

10. References

• What is a reference?
• The two ways to create references
• References to existing data
• References to anonymous data
• Dereferencing scalar, array, and ash references
• Dereferencing elements of arrays and hashes
• Multidimensional arrays and other data structures

11. Text and Regular Expressions

• String length
• The substr() function
• The index() and rindex() functions
• String replication
• Pattern matching and substitution
• Regular expressions

12. Raw file and data access

• Opening and closing raw (binary) files
• Reading raw data
• Using seek() and tell()
• Writing raw data
• Raw data manipulation with pack()and unpack()

13. Subroutines and variable scope

• Understanding packages
• Package and Lexical variables
• Localizing builtin variables
• Declaring and calling subroutines
• Calling subroutines
• Passing parameters and returning values

14. Working with the operating system

• Determining current OS
• Environment variables
• Running external programs
• User identification
• Trapping signals
• File test operators
• Working with files
• Time of day

15. Shortcuts and defaults

• Understanding $_
• shift() with no array specified
• Text file processing
• Using grep() and Using map()
• Command-line options forfile processing

16. Data wrangling

• Quoting in Perl
• Evaluating arrays
• Understanding qw( )
• Getting more out of the <> operator
• Read ranges of lines
• Using m//g in scalar context
• The /o modifier
• Working with embedded newlines
• Making REs more readable
• Perl data conversion

17. Using the Perl Library

• The Perl library
• Old-style library files
• Perl modules
• Modules bundled with Perl
• A selection of modules
• Getting modules from ActiveState
• Getting modules from CPAN
• Using Getopt::Long

18. Some Useful Tools

• Sending and receiving files with Net::FTP
• Using File::Find to search for files and directories
• Grabbing a Web page
• Some good places to find scripts
• Perl man pages for more information
• Zipping and unzipping files