Introduction to Perl Programming Essentials

Course Objectives

Throughout the course students will be led through a series of progressively advanced topics, where each topic consists of lecture, group discussion, comprehensive hands-on lab exercises, and lab review. This course is “skills-centric”, designed to train attendees in core Perl and web development skills beyond an intermediate level, coupling the most current, effective techniques with best practices.

Course Agenda

Please note that this list of topics is based on our standard course offering, evolved from typical industry uses and trends. We will work with you to tune this course and level of coverage to target the skills you need most.

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: Formatting output

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

Session: Hashes

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

Session: 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

Session: Text and Regular Expressions

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

Session: 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()

Session: Subroutines and variable scope

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

Session: 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

Session: Shortcuts and defaults

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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: 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