Perl for System Administrators

Course Outline

Session: Getting Started

• What is Perl?
• 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

• Report formatting overview
• Defining report formats
• The write() function

Session: Hashes

• Hash overview
• Creating hashes

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

Session: References and data structures

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

Session: Text and Regular Expressions

• String length
• String functions and operators
• Quoting in Perl
• Regular expressions
• Advanced pattern matching and substitution

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: Managing files and directories

• File attributes
• Reading a directory
• Using File::Find
• Permissions
• Copying and moving files
• Renaming and deleting files and directories
• File test operators

Session: Sys Admin Part 1

• Environment variables
• Running external programs
• User identification
• Trapping signals
• Backtick operator
• 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: Using Modules

• Perl modules
• Use vs. require
• A quick tour
• Bundled libraries and modules
• Downloading and installing from CPAN
• Case study: Using Getopt::Long

Session: Creating Modules

• Review of subroutines
• Understanding my () and local ()
• Packages and the symbol table

• Mechanics of module creation
• Exporting subroutines and data
• Using BEGIN and END
• Good module design

Session: Classes

• Perl's approach to Classes
• Understanding bless
• Constructors
• Methods
• Properties
• Inheritance

Session: Exception handling

• Simple exception handling
• Trapping exceptions
• Using Carp, Croak, and Cluck
• Raising exceptions

Session: Sys Admin Part 2

• Monitoring files
• Accessing syslog
• Network information
• User management

OPTIONAL ITEMS | As time permits:

Session: Network Tools

• Copying files across the network
• Remote login
• Grabbing data from the Web

Session: Serializing Data

• Available tools
• Storable
• JSON

Session: Enterprise Development

• Coding standards
• Source code tools
• Core modules
• Saving time with module-starter
• Documenting with POD
• Benchmarking and Profiling
• Unit testing
• Distributing and installing modules