Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days

Description

Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days will cover the basics in the first few chapters, and then move to practical uses of Perl and in-depth discussions of more advanced topics. Later chapters will also delve into software engineering topics, with discussions of modular code and object-oriented programming. CGI will be covered in one chapter, but will not be the focus of the book. Teach Yourself Perl will rely heavily on longer working examples and code, as opposed to small snippets and code fragments. Each chapter will include two to three smaller complete examples and one major one that illustrates most of the concepts for that chapter and builds on the chapters before it.

Sample Content

Table of Contents

WEEK 1. GETTING STARTED.

What Is Perl and Where Did It Come From? Why Learn Perl? Getting Started Programming in Perl. An Example: The Ubiquitous Hello World. Another Example: Echo. A Third Example: The Cookie Monster. Going Deeper. Summary. Q&A. Workshop. Answers.

Scalar Data and Scalar Variables. Constructing Perl Scripts. Arithmetic Operators. An Example: Converting Fahrenheit to Celsius. Operators for Tests and Comparisons. Going Deeper. Summary. Q&A. Workshop. Answers.

Assignment Operators. Increment and Decrement Operators. String Concatenation and Repetition. Operator Precedence and Associativity. An Example: Simple Statistics. Input and Output. A Note About Using Functions. Going Deeper. Summary. Q&A. Workshop. Answers.

List Data and Variables. Defining and Using Lists and Arrays. An Example: More Stats. List and Scalar Context. Input, Output, and Lists. Going Deeper. Summary. Q&A. Workshop. Answers.

Hashes Versus Arrays and Lists. Hashes. An Example: Frequencies in the Statistics Program. Another Example: Alphabetical Lists of Names. Going Deeper. Summary. Q&A. Workshop. Answers.

Complex Statements and Blocks. Conditionals. while Loops. An Example: Pick a Number. Iteration with for Loops. Controlling Loops. Using the $_ (Default) Variable. Input from Files with while Loops and <>. Going Deeper. Summary. Q&A. Workshop. Answers.

Statistics with a Better Histogram. A Number Speller. Text-to-HTML Converter Script. Summary.

WEEK 2. DOING MORE.

Array and Hash Slices. Sorting Lists. Searching. An Example: More Names. Modifying List Elements. Other Ways to Mess with Lists. Manipulating Strings. Going Deeper. Summary. Q&A. Workshop. Answers.

The Whys and Wherefores of Pattern Matching. Pattern Matching Operators and Expressions. Simple Patterns. Matching Groups of Characters. An Example: Optimizing numspeller. Matching Multiple Instances of Characters. More About Building Patterns. Another Example: Counting. Pattern Precedence. Going Deeper. Summary. Q&A. Workshop. Answers.

Extracting Matches. Using Patterns for Search and Replace. More About split. Matching Patterns over Multiple Lines. A Summary of Options and Escapes. An Example: Image Extractor. Going Deeper. Summary. Q&A. Workshop. Answers.

Subroutines Versus Functions. Defining and Calling Basic Subroutin

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