Advanced Perl Programming: From Advanced to Expert

by William "Bo" Rothwell

Overview

William "Bo" Rothwell's Advanced Perl Programming continues where his previous book left off, more or less, as it guides you through advanced techniques of the Perl programming language starting with command-line options, references, and arrays and hashes from advanced data types. Next, you'll learn about typeglobs for symbolic entries.

Additionally, you'll see advanced subroutine handling, then packages and namespaces. Furthermore, you'll build advanced modules and install CPAN modules. Unlike Java and C++, modules have been around in Perl for a long time now. Along the way, you'll learn and use POD mark up language for Perl documentation.

Moreover, you'll get a survey of the many advanced features and data structures of the current Perl programming language. You'll also get a survey of the new features of the latest Perl 5.x release. After reading and using this book, you'll have the tools, techniques, and source code to be an expert Perl programmer.

What You Will Learn

• Carry out command-line parsing and extract scripts
• Create references; return values from a reference; work with the ref Function and strict refs
• Work with advanced Perl data types using arrays, hashes, and hash of hashes
• Use Typeglobs for symbol table entries
• Build modules and install CPAN modules

• Write documentation for Perl using POD
• Work with the newest features in Perl, including the smartmatch operator, yada yada, automated regex modifiers, the CORE namespace and more

Who This Book Is For

Those with experience with Perl or who have read Rothwell's prior books, Beginning Perl Programming and Pro Perl Programming.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781484258620
Publisher:	Apress
Publication date:	05/31/2020
Edition description:	1st ed.
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	7.01(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

At the impressionable age of 14, William "Bo" Rothwell crossed paths with a TRS-80 Micro Computer System (affectionately known as a “Trash 80”). Soon after the adults responsible for Bo made the mistake of leaving him alone with the TSR-80. He immediately dismantled it and held his first computer class, showing his friends what made this “computer thing” work. Since this experience, Bo’s passion for understanding how computers work and sharing this knowledge with others has resulting in a rewarding career in IT training. His experience includes Linux, Unix, DevOps tools, and programming languages such as Perl, Python, Tcl, and BASH.

Table of Contents

Chapter One Command Line Options
1.1 Introducing Command Line Options
1.2 Changing Input Record Separator
1.3 Create a Loop Around Your Script
1.4 Editing in Place
1.5 Syntax Checking
1.6 Pre-appending to @INC
1.7 Including Modules
1.8 Command Line Parsing
1.9 Displaying Configuration Information
1.10 Extracting Scripts from Messages1.11 Additional Resources
1.12 Lab Exercises

Chapter Two References
2.1 What are References?
2.2 Creating References
2.3 Returning the Value from a Reference
2.4 The ref Function
2.5 Making Anonymous References
2.6 References to Functions
2.7 use strict ‘refs’
2.8 Additional Resources
2.9 Lab Exercises

Chapter Three Advanced Data Types: Arrays
3.1 Review: What You Should Already Know About Arrays
3.2 What You Might Know About Arrays
3.3 Arrays of Arrays
3.4 Creating Arrays of Arrays
3.5 Accessing Values in an Array of Arrays
3.6 Adding a Sub Array (Row)
3.7 Adding a column
3.8 Printing an Array of Arrays
3.9 Additional Resources
3.10 Lab Exercises

Chapter Four Advanced Data Types: Hashes
4.1 Review: What You Should Already Know About Hashes
4.2 What You Might Know About Hashes
4.3 Hashes of Hashes
4.4 Creating Hashes of Hashes
4.5 Accessing Values in a Hash of Hashes
4.6 Other Data Structures
4.7 Additional Resources
4.8 Lab Exercises

Chapter Five Typeglobs
5.1 Symbolic Tables
5.2 Typeglobs
5.3 Using typeglobs
5.4 References vs. Typeglobs
5.5 Avoiding Aliases to Entire Identifier
5.6 Making constants
5.7 Passing Filehandles into Functions5.8 Redefining a Function
5.9 Temporarily Redefining a Function
5.10 Additional Resources
5.11 Lab Exercises

Chapter Six Advanced Subroutine Handling
6.1 Review: What You Should Already Know About Functions
6.2 What You Might Know About Functions
6.3 Making Persistent Function Variables
6.4 Using the caller Function
6.5 Passing Arguments by Reference
6.6 Determining Functions Return Data
6.7 Returning Multiple Values
6.8 Exception Handling
6.9 Constant Functions
6.10 Prototypes
6.11 Additional Resources
6.12 Lab Exercises

Chapter Seven Packages and Namespaces
7.1 Scope
7.2 Creating Namespaces with the package Command
7.3 Fully Qualified Package Names
7.4 Nested Packages
7.5 use strict 'vars'
7.6 Identifiers Not Affected by Packages
7.7 Determine the Current Package
7.8 Packages vs. my Variables7.9 Additional Resources
7.10 Lab Exercises

Chapter Eight Building Modules
8.1 Introduction to Perl Modules
8.2 Creating a Module8.3 BEGIN and END Blocks
8.4 Symbol Tables in Modules
8.5 Exporting Identifiers from Modules
8.6 Private Identifiers
8.7 Oking Symbols to Export from Modules
8.8 Module Version Numbers
8.9 use vs. require
8.10 A Note About Library Files
8.11 Additional Resources
8.12 Lab Exercises

Chapter Nine Installing CPAN Modules
9.1 What is CPAN?
9.2 Accessing CPAN
9.3 CPAN Organization
9.4 Installing a CPAN Module Manually
9.5 Installing CPAN Modules Using the CPAN Module9.6 Using the Perl Package Manager to Install CPAN Modules
9.7 Listing What Modules are Currently Installed
9.8 Additional Resources
9.9 Lab Exercises

Chapter Ten POD
10.1 Overview of POD
10.2 POD Commands
10.3 POD Text
10.4 POD Verbatim
10.5 POD Examples
10.6 Common POD Problems
10.7 POD Utilities
10.8 Additional Resources
10.9 Lab Exercises

Chapter Eleven Advanced Features
11.1 Perl development environments11.2 The power of the do statement
11.3 autodie
11.4 String variables as files
11.5 File::Spec
11.6 Proper use of soft references
11.7 Install modules from CPAN without admin privileges
11.8 Basic testing
11.9 Advanced testing
11.10 Using prove
11.11 Benchmarking

Chapter Twelve Advanced Data Structures

12.1 Introduction to Benchmarking
12.2 Use the Readonly module to create constants
12.3 Make large numbers more readable
12.4 Make use of Scalar::Util
12.5 Make use of List::Util
12.6 Make use of List::MoreUtils
12.7 List formatting
12.8 Understand slices
12.9 Make use of Hash::Util
12.10 Make use of Hash::MoreUtils
12.11 Smart use of subscripts
12.12 Understand the advantages and disadvantages of for, foreach, grep and map
12.13 Know different sort techniques
12.14 Avoid using memory to store large data

Chapter Thirteen New Features
12.1 Perl versions
12.2 The latest/greatest?
12.3 Changes by version
12.4 The feature pragma
12.5 Make use of the Smartmatch Operator
12.6 The // operator
12.7 The UNITCHECK block
12.8 Yada yada
12.9 The autodie pragma
12.10 Using each, keys, values with arrays 12.11 New Regular Expression modifiers
12.12 Non-destructive substation
12.13 Automating Regular Expression modifiers
12.14 New feature for given
12.15 Change in use feature
12.16 The CORE namespace
12.17 Overriding Perl keywords

Editorial Reviews

The book is well written. Potential traps and ‘gotchas’ are identified to help the reader avoid self-inflicted difficulties.” (Anthony J. Duben, Computing Reviews, June 4, 2021)

From the Publisher