Advanced Perl programming — a 3–day course

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