Beginning Perl

This is a book for those of us who believed that we didn?t need to learn Perl, and now we know it is more ubiquitous than ever. Perl is extremely flexible and powerful, and it isn?t afraid of Web 2.0 or the cloud. Originally touted as the duct tape of the Internet, Perl has since evolved into a multipurpose, multiplatform language present absolutely everywhere: heavy-duty web applications, the cloud, systems administration, natural language processing, and financial engineering. Beginning Perl, Third Edition provides valuable insight into Perl's role regarding all of these tasks and more.

Commencing with a comprehensive overview of language basics, you?ll learn all about important concepts such as Perl's data types and control flow constructs. This material sets the stage for a discussion of more complex topics, such as writing custom functions, using regular expressions, and file input and output. Next, the book moves on to the advanced topics of object-oriented programming, modules, web programming, and database administration with Perl's powerful database interface module, DBI. The examples and code provided offer you all of the information you need to start writing your own powerful scripts to solve the problems listed above, and many more.

Whether you are a complete novice or an experienced programmer, Beginning Perl, Third Edition offers an ideal guide to learning Perl. What you?ll learn How to use the power of Perl How to handle Perl data structures How to build database applications regardless of the underlying database How to parse complex data How to write industrial-strength object-oriented Perl How to start web programming in Perl Who this book is for

This book is for programmers of all shades and persuasions who thought they could do without Perl. Think again. Table of Contents First Steps in Perl Scalars Control Flow Constructs Lists and Arrays Hashes Subroutines/Functions Regular Expressions Files and Data String Processing Interfacing to the Operating System References Modules Object-Oriented Perl Introduction to CGI Perl and DBI

Perl was originally written by Larry Wall while he was working at NASA s Jet Propulsion Labs. Larry is an Internet legend, known not just for Perl, but as the author of the UNIX utilities rn, one of the original Usenet newsreaders, and patch, a tremendously useful tool that takes a list of differences between two files and allows you to turn one into the other. The term patch used for this activity is now widespread. Perl started life as a glue language for Larry and his officemates, allowing one to stick different tools together by converting between their various data formats. It pulled together the best features of several languages: the powerful regular expressions from sed (the Unix stream editor), the patte- scanning language awk, and a few other languages and utilities. The syntax was further made up out of C, Pascal, Basic, Unix shell languages, English, and maybe a few other elements along the way. While Perl started its life as glue, it is now more often likened to another handy multiuse tool: duct tape. A common statement heard in cyberspace is that Perl is the duct tape that holds the Internet together."