Learning Perl: Making Easy Things Easy and Hard Things Possible, 7th Edition

If you’re just getting started with Perl, this is the book you want—whether you’re a programmer, system administrator, or web hacker. Nicknamed “the Llama” by two generations of users, this bestseller closely follows the popular introductory Perl course taught by the authors since 1991. This seventh edition covers recent changes to the language up to version 5.24.

Perl is suitable for almost any task on almost any platform, from short fixes to complete web applications. Learning Perl teaches you the basics and shows you how to write programs up to 128 lines long—roughly the size of 90% of the Perl programs in use today. Each chapter includes exercises to help you practice what you’ve just learned. Other books may teach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.

Topics include:

• Perl data and variable types
• Subroutines
• File operations
• Regular expressions
• String manipulation (including Unicode)
• Lists and sorting
• Process management
• Smart matching
• Use of third party modules

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Scalar Data
Chapter 3. Lists and Arrays
Chapter 4. Subroutines
Chapter 5. Input and Output
Chapter 6. Hashes
Chapter 7. Regular Expressions
Chapter 8. Matching with Regular Expressions
Chapter 9. Processing Text with Regular Expressions
Chapter 10. More Control Structures
Chapter 11. Perl Modules
Chapter 12. File Tests
Chapter 13. Directory Operations
Chapter 14. Strings and Sorting
Chapter 15. Process Management
Chapter 16. Some Advanced Perl Techniques
Appendix A. Exercise Answers
Appendix B. Beyond the Llama
Appendix C. A Unicode Primer
Appendix D. Experimental Features