Games Diversions & Perl Culture: Best of the Perl Journal

Games, Diversions, and Perl Culture is the third volume of The Best of the Perl Journal, compiled and re-edited by the original editor and publisher of The Perl Journal, Jon Orwant. In this series, we’ve taken the very best (and still relevant) articles published in TPJ over its 5 years of publication and immortalized them into three volumes.

The 47 articles included in this volume are simply some of the best Perl articles ever written on the subjects of games, diversions, and the unique culture of this close-knit community, by some of the best Perl authors and coders. Games, Diversions & Perl Culture focuses on entertaining topics that make Perl users such fanatics about the language. You’ll find all of the playful features TPJ offered over the years, including the Obfuscated Perl Contests, Perl Quiz Shows, humor articles, and renowned one-line recipes. The book also contains a panoply of quirky applications of Perl, including genetic algorithms, home automation, music programming, and an entire section on natural language processing.

This anthology is an unmatched compendium of Perl lore.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Wherefore Art, Thou?
Chapter 3 TPJ Cover Art: From Camels to Spam
Chapter 4 Perl Style
Chapter 5 Home Automation with MisterHouse
Chapter 6 Home Automation: The X10 Nitty-Gritty
Chapter 7 A Day in the Life of comp.lang.perl.misc
Chapter 8 Perl-fect Sundials
Chapter 9 Genetic Algorithms
Chapter 10 How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project
Chapter 11 PDL: The Perl Data Language
Chapter 12 Chatbot::Eliza
Chapter 13 Infobots and Purl
Chapter 14 Speech Synthesis
Chapter 15 Lazy Text Formatting
Chapter 16 Perl and MIDI: Simple Languages, Easy Music
Chapter 17 Braille Contractions and Regular Expressions
Chapter 18 Hypernyms, Hyponyms, Pertainyms, and Other Word Relationships
Chapter 19 Parsing Natural Language
Chapter 20 Word Morphology
Chapter 21 Smart Matching for Human Names
Chapter 22 Localizing Your Perl Programs
Chapter 23 Internationalized Sorting
Chapter 24 Simulating Typos with Perl
Chapter 25 Correcting Typos with Perl
Chapter 26 Learning Japanese with an HTML Filter
Chapter 27 Games in Perl
Chapter 28 The Prisoner’s Dilemma
Chapter 29 The Rezrov Infocom Game Interpreter
Chapter 30 Tktk: A Perl/Tk Solitaire Game
Chapter 31 The First Perl/Internet Quiz Show
Chapter 32 The Second Perl/Internet Quiz Show
Chapter 33 The Third Perl/Internet Quiz Show
Chapter 34 The Fourth Perl/Internet Quiz Show
Chapter 35 The Perl Whirl Quiz Show
Chapter 36 The Perl Wizard’s Quiz
Chapter 37 Just Another Perl Haiku
Chapter 38 Searching for Rhymes with Perl
Chapter 39 The Perl Poetry Contest
Chapter 40 Pairwise Voting
Chapter 41 Secure Internet Voting
Chapter 42 Perl and Nuclear Weapons Don’t Mix
Chapter 43 The Zeroth Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest
Chapter 44 The First Obfuscated Perl Contest
Chapter 45 The Third Obfuscated Perl Contest
Chapter 46 The Fourth Obfuscated Perl Contest
Chapter 47 The Fifth Obfuscated Perl Contest
Chapter 48 One-Liners