Beginning Perl Programming (eBook)

Get started with Perl 5 and learn the important core concepts of Perl programming, such as variables, flow control, expressions, and I/O. Additionally, this book covers pattern matching and shows that Perl is extremely flexible and powerful, and that it isn't afraid of the cloud. After reading and using this book, you'll be able to start writing your own powerful scripts to solve many web and programming problems.  

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. You'll see that Perl has evolved into a multipurpose, multiplatform language present absolutely everywhere: heavy-duty web applications, the cloud, systems administration, natural language processing, and financial engineering. This book provides valuable insight into Perl's role regarding all of these tasks and more giving you a great start in your Perl programming adventure.

What You Will Learn

• Perform operations on scalar values
• Use scalar, array, and associative array variables
• Work with flow control statements such as if, unless, while, until, for, and foreach
• Read and write directly to files with file handles 
• Use conditional expressions such as numeric and string comparison, regular expressions, file testing, and Perl statements
• Format output with format statements 
• Search for and replace sub-strings within a string using regular expressions
• Master Perl utilities such as split, join, index and more
• Control the file system and processes from within a Perl script
• Build functions for tasks including handling the scope of variables
• Import existing modules into your Perl script

Who This Book Is For

Those who are new to Perl.

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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 "e;glue"e; language for Larry and his officemates, allowing one to "e;stick"e; 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.