Take the next step toward Perl mastery with advanced concepts that make coding easier, maintenance simpler, and execution faster. Mastering Perl isn't a collection of clever tricks, but a way of thinking about Perl programming for solving debugging, configuration, and many other real-world problems you’ll encounter as a working programmer. The third in O’Reilly’s series of landmark Perl tutorials (after Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl), this fully upated edition pulls everything together and helps you bend Perl to your will. Explore advanced regular expressions features Avoid common problems when writing secure programs Profile and benchmark Perl programs to see where they need work Wrangle Perl code to make it more presentable and readable Understand how Perl keeps track of package variables Define subroutines on the fly Jury-rig modules to fix code without editing the original source Use bit operations and bit vectors to store large data efficiently Learn how to detect errors that Perl doesn’t report Dive into logging, data persistence, and the magic of tied variables

The sixth edition of this bestselling Perl tutorial includes recent changes to the language. Years of classroom testing and experience helped shape the book's pace and scope, and this edition is packed with exercises that let readers practice the concepts while they follow the text.

Many programmers would love to use Perl for projects that involve heavy lifting, but miss the many traditional algorithms that textbooks teach for other languages. Computer scientists have identified many techniques that a wide range of programs need, such as: Fuzzy pattern matching for text (identify misspellings!) Finding correlations in data Game-playing algorithms Predicting phenomena such as Web traffic Polynomial and spline fitting Using algorithms explained in this book, you too can carry out traditional programming tasks in a high-powered, efficient, easy-to-maintain manner with Perl.This book assumes a basic understanding of Perl syntax and functions, but not necessarily any background in computer science. The authors explain in a readable fashion the reasons for using various classic programming techniques, the kind of applications that use them, and -- most important -- how to code these algorithms in Perl.If you are an amateur programmer, this book will fill you in on the essential algorithms you need to solve problems like an expert. If you have already learned algorithms in other languages, you will be surprised at how much different (and often easier) it is to implement them in Perl. And yes, the book even has the obligatory fractal display program.There have been dozens of books on programming algorithms, some of them excellent, but never before has there been one that uses Perl.The authors include the editor of The Perl Journal and master librarian of CPAN; all are contributors to CPAN and have archived much of the code in this book there."This book was so exciting I lost sleep reading it." Tom Christiansen

This is the third in O'Reilly's series of landmark Perl tutorials, which started with Learning Perl, the bestselling introduction that taught you the basics of Perl syntax, and Intermediate Perl, which taught you how to create re-usable Perl software. Mastering Perl pulls everything together to show you how to bend Perl to your will. It convey's Perl's special models and programming idioms. This book isn't a collection of clever tricks, but a way of thinking about Perl programming so you can integrate the real-life problems of debugging, maintenance, configuration, and other tasks you encounter as a working programmer. The book explains how to: Use advanced regular expressions, including global matches, lookarounds, readable regexes, and regex debugging Avoid common programing problems with secure programming techniques Profile and benchmark Perl to find out where to focus your improvements Wrangle Perl code to make it more presentable and readable See how Perl keeps track of package variables and how you can use that for some powerful tricks Define subroutines on the fly and turn the tables on normal procedural programming. Modify and jury rig modules to fix code without editing the original source Let your users configure your programs without touching the code Learn how you can detect errors Perl doesn't report, and how to tell users about them Let your Perl program talk back to you by using Log4perl Store data for later use in another program, a later run of the same program, or to send them over a network Write programs as modules to get the benefit of Perl's distribution and testing tools Appendices include "brian's Guide to Solving Any Perl Problem" to improve your troubleshooting skills, as well as suggested reading to continue your Perl education. Mastering Perl starts you on your path to becoming the person with the answers, and, failing that, the person who knows how to find the answers or discover the problem.

"Intermediate Perl" offers a clear roadmap for improving readers' skills and gain working knowledge of Perl's objects, references, and modules--ingredients that make the language so versatile and effective. This book offers a gentle but thorough introduction to intermediate programming in Perl.

Perl is a powerful programming language used primarily for system administration, web programming, and database manipulation. Perl/Tk is the marriage of Perl with the Tk toolkit, which allows Perl programs to be built with attractive, intuitive GUIs. Mastering Perl/Tk is the "Bible" of Perl/Tk: the one and only book needed not only to get started with Perl/Tk, but also to learn the techniques of experienced Perl/Tk programmers. The first half of the book contains the basics on how to use Perl/Tk, with coverage of all the basic widgets and a thorough tutorial of the geometry managers that determine how each widget is laid out. Mastering Perl/Tk then branches out into advanced applications of Perl/Tk, with a series of extensive program examples. The result is a book that is not only accessible for novices, but will also take experienced programmers to the next step in learning how to program elegantly and effectively in Perl/Tk. The book also includes a complete quick reference for each standard widget and listings of all the extended examples in the book. Book jacket.

Working on the assumption that the reader has no formal training in programming, Perl Programming for Biologists demonstrates how Perl is used to solve biological problems. Each chapter opens with a set of learning objectives, provides numerous review questions and self-study exercises, and concludes with a bulleted summary of key points. The author incorporates numerous real-life examples throughout the text. Upon completing the book, readers are able to quickly perform such tasks as correcting recurring errors in spreadsheets, scanning a Fasta sequence for every occurrence of an EcoRI site, adapting other writers' scripts to one's own purposes, and most important, writing reusable and maintainable scripts that spare the rote repetition of code.