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Advanced Perl programming — a 3–day course

Synopsis

A course in Advanced Perl programming for those with a basic knowledge of the language and a desire to extend their skills.

Please Note: This Perl training course outline provides a selection of advanced skills in multi-purpose Perl programming rather than merely specialist applications of the language. In practice, most purchasers of our advanced Perl courses tend to require a combination of generic and specialist skills. For that reason, we typically ask them to talk to our Perl consultants about building a course combining some of the course modules outlined here with other specialist modules from our complete listing of Perl training course modules.

On the other hand, if you need an off-the-shelf specialist Perl course, please consider our Perl for system administration and our Perl for web development courses.

Suitable for

  • Perl programmers who want or need to use the Perl language well in a variety of contexts.
  • Developers who want to optimise their Perl; taking advantage of the language's native productivity tools and techniques, rather than holding on to inefficient methods imported from other languages.

Prerequisites

  • Considerable Perl programming experience

Delivery

This is a hands-on practical workshop based around the coding of real world solutions to real world problems.

This advanced Perl training course is run primarily as an in-house/on-site course for company groups.

From time to time, we take bookings from individuals on publicly scheduled versions of the course. Because of the relatively small numbers of people who are ready for advanced perl programming, we tend to accumulate a list of interested individuals before announcing a particular date.

Please contact us at training@gbdirect.co.uk to arrange delivery of this course for your company or to register an interest in an individual place on a public presentation of this course. N.B. Please state clearly, which one of these two options applies to you.


Contents

Finding Out More For Yourself 

  • How to read Perl's documentation
  • Where to find more information
  • Knowing what's out there to look for
  • FAQs
  • The Perl Cookbook

Command Line Perl 

  • Writing Perl programs on the command line
  • Using Perl as a filter
  • Perl imitating other programs: Awk, grep, sed
  • Perl editing files
  • Command line flags
  • Many real world examples

Advanced File Processing with Perl 

  • Types of open
  • Filehandles
  • Reading line by line
  • Reading paragraph by paragraph
  • Reading entire files
  • Special variables
  • The flip-flop operator (..)
  • File test functions
  • Pipes

Advanced Perl Regular Expressions 

  • Commenting regexps — /x
  • Back-references
  • Alternation
  • Quantifiers: ?, {}
  • Non-greedy quantifiers
  • Finding multiple matches
  • Zero-width assertions: anchors, lookahead, lookbehind
  • Dynamically making replacement text

Object-Oriented Techniques in Perl

  • Using object-orientation: classes and objects
  • Constructors
  • Object methods
  • Destructors
  • Dual-purpose class and object methods
  • Inheritance
  • An example class: CGI::Page

Advanced Perl Miscellany 

  • Exception-handling: trapping run-time errors
  • Executing code fragments in strings
  • Secret subroutines
  • Static variables
  • Subroutine prototypes
  • Benchmarking code

Creating Perl Modules 

  • Modules
  • Packages & files
  • Creating a module
  • Defining functions in modules
  • Exporting functions from modules
  • Variables in modules
  • When you should create a module

Using the Perl Debugger 

  • Avoiding bugs
  • Perl's built-in debugger
  • Invoking the debugger
  • What you can do with the debugger
  • Understanding the debugger's command line interface
  • Knowing the debugger's basic command set
  • Exploring some extended functions
  • Graphical debuggers
  • Alternative debugging techniques

Perl Style 

  • The Philosophy of Perl
  • Why good style is important
  • Good style
  • Bad style

Reading Perl 

  • Reading well-written Perl programs
  • Reading badly-written Perl programs

Advanced Object-Oriented Techniques in Perl

  • Multiple inheritance
  • Method resolution algorithm
  • Customizing method dispatch using AUTOLOAD
  • Using tie to make instances simulate scalars, aggregates, or file handles
  • Operator overloading

Managing Dates and Times in Perl

  • Time-keeping concepts
  • Built-in time functions
  • The DateTime modules

Perl training UK enquiries

UK Training enquiries and feedback form.

Perl training UK prices

For publicly scheduled training (individual places), see our UK training schedule.

In-house training for company groups is charged at a daily rate per group — see our In-House UK Training Guidelines.

Publicly Scheduled Training Locations

We currently run public training courses in the following locations:

  • London, UK
  • Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK
  • Birmingham, West Midlands, UK
  • Carshalton, Surrey, UK
  • Chester, North West, UK
  • Coventry, West Midlands, UK
  • Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
  • Glasgow, Scotland, UK
  • Harwell, Oxfordshire, UK
  • Manchester, North West, UK
  • Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, UK
  • Newark, Nottinghamshire, UK
  • Reading, Berkshire, UK
  • Slough, Berkshire, UK
  • Stevenage, Hertfordshire, UK
  • Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK
  • Wokingham, Berkshire, UK

Most UK public training courses are available on a monthly basis.

Please see the individual course outlines or our public training schedule for details.

In-house (on-site) training locations

We deliver in-house courses at client premises and/or training facilities in any part of the world which is practically and commercially accessible.

Our In-house training guidelines outline our basic requirements and our UK pricing structure. To estimate costs for training in other countries, simply convert to your local currency and then make a rough calculation of our tutor's costs for travelling to and staying at your location.


West Yorkshire Office

GBdirect Ltd
Training Division
Bradford Design Exchange
34 Peckover Street
BRADFORD
BD1 5BD
West Yorkshire
United Kingdom

training@gbdirect.co.uk

Training: 0800 651 0338
General: +44 (0)870 200 7273
Finance: +44 (0)1353 615 174

Please call between 0900 and 1700 (UK time) on Monday to Friday


South East Regional Office

GBdirect Ltd
Training Division
18 Lynn Rd
ELY
CB6 1DA
Cambridgeshire
United Kingdom

training@gbdirect.co.uk

Training: 0800 651 0338
General: +44 (0)870 200 7273
Finance: +44 (0)1353 615 174

Please call between 0900 and 1700 (UK time) on Monday to Friday


Please note:
Non-training enquiries should be directed, initially, to our UK national office in Bradford (West Yorkshire), even if the enquiry concerns services delivered in London or South/East England. Clients in London and the South East will typically be handled by staff working in the London or Cambridge areas.