Perl Programming - Part 2

Audience

System administrators and developers who want to use the power of the language more fully.

Prerequisites

Students should have attended our Perl Programming - Part 1 course or have equivalent knowledge.

Duration

2 days. Hands on.

Course Objectives

Perl is a mature, extremely flexible, general-purpose language, which is especially well suited to textual manipulation. In addition to its extensive built-in facilities, there are vast freely-accessible libraries of Perl code to help build almost every conceivable application. This course builds on the techniques in Perl Programming - Part 1. It covers the more advanced programming and data structuring techniques provided by Perl, including references, modules and object-oriented techniques, suitable for high-level applications of all types.

Course Content

Review
Data types and their manipulation
Control structures and subroutines
Text manipulation
Input/Output techniques

References
Basics revisited
Multidimensional arrays
Reference types and ref() function
Reference constructs
Advanced data structure examples
Sorting an array of references

Subroutines
Reference passing and prototypes
Subroutine pre-declaration
Anonymous subroutines
Call by reference
Prototypes
Overloaded functions?

Useful Standard Library modules
Math modules
Time modules
Benchmark.pm
Config.pm
File/directory standard library modules:
File::Basename, { File::Copy, { File::Find, { File::Path

File and Directory Manipulation
Emulating operating sytems commands
Globbing and directory handles

Packages and modules
Namespaces and packages
use and require
Module semantics
@INC array
lib module
File/directory standard library modules
BEGIN...END blocks
AUTOLOADing

Object-oriented programming
Background to object-orientation
Accessing object methods
Class methods and attributes
bless() function
The -> notation and variations
Perl-style inheritance, @ISA special array
Polymorphism
Introduction to the tie command
Private data via closures
Regular Expressions

Miscellaneous/advanced functions and keywords
Random numbers
eval
bit manipulation
pack and unpack
Advanced array functions
Other miscellaneous function