Description
This intensive course provides a solid introduction to the Perl programming language. Hands-on exercises reinforce key concepts.

Audience
Developers and system administrators who wish to develop systems or application programs on either Unix or Windows platforms using the Perl programming language.

Prerequisites
Familiarity with C, procedural programming, or shell scripting is beneficial.

Hardware and Software
PCs or workstations capable of running a Perl development environment. The systems should be able to load a 3.5” DOS-formatted solution disk. Perl 5+ properly installed on the platform of choice.

Format

• Presentation
  
• Hands-on
  

Objectives
After completing this course, participants should be able to:

• Write useful Perl scripts to solve common problems
• Use flow control, operators, lists, and hashes
• Understand and use pattern matching (regular expressions)
• Create subroutines and use library routines
• Create and use references
• Create and use modules
• Employ object-oriented programming techniques

Getting Started

• Running Perl programs
• Basic statement syntax
• Comments, variables, basic operators and functions
• Reading from standard input, writing to standard output and standard error

Operators

• Arithmetic, assignment, relational, logical, bitwise, and string operators
• Precedence and associativity

Flow Control

• If-else, elsif, and unless statements
• The warn(), die(), and exit() functions
• While and until loops

Working with Scalars

• Scalar variables; character strings
• Escape sequences

Working with Lists

• Defining and using list variables
• Assigning list elements to other variables
• Command line arguments
• Working with list ranges and list slices

Working with Hashes

• Creating hashes from lists
• Adding and deleting hash elements

Reading and Writing to Files

• Opening a file
• Determining file status
• Using pipes

Pattern Matching

• Substitution and translation operators

Creating and Using Subroutines

Formatting Output

• Value formats

File and Directory Functions

• File access, link, and directory manipulation functions

Process, Scalar, and List Functions

• Process, mathematical, string, scalar, list manipulation, and time functions

System Variables and Options

• Separator and pattern match variables
• -n and –p options

References

• Creating multidimensional arrays

Packages and Modules

• Importing modules into a program

Object-Oriented Programming in Perl

• Creating and using classes