*Condensed, readable style; delivers tremendous value in just one book. This book offers *THE resource for focused and pragmatic industrial solutions in Perl, while the competing *best-sellers are older, quirkier and shallower treatments of Perl. *Thorough discussion of Perl—from installations to applications development; ideal for working Perl programmers in 2005. *Wainwright is a respected Perl expert and author of industry-respected Pro Apache title.

Master intermediate to advanced techniques of the Perl programming language starting with a focus on regular expressions and some of their advanced features. This book then covers other pro-level features, including formatted output, file handling, and more. Additionally, you'll learn and explore the most useful built-in variables, pragmas, and modules available in the Perl language. Furthermore, you'll work with geometry managers and get a thorough treatment of graphical user interface development using Perl/TK and widgets. Lastly, you’ll cover debugging techniques. Pro Perl Programming is a professional-level reference guide on Perl and includes important aspects of it that you need as a professional programmer. What You Will Learn Program regular expressions including atoms, smartmatch operators, and more Use advanced features such as HiRes Time, slurp() functions, Critic, Tidy and many more functions Handle advanced formatted output such as printf and sprintf Explore useful built-in variables, including status variables, separator variables, and the signal handle variable Explore and use Perl's built-in modules, including the Pragma modules Work with Perl/TK and its widgets-like geometry managers, frames, labels, buttons, check buttons, radio buttons, scrollbars, scales, entries, and menus Who This Book Is For Those with at least some prior experience with Perl programming or have read Beginning Perl Programming by William Rothwell.

*Surpasses archaic debugging practices. *Introduces advanced debugger topics such as customization, optimization and extension. *Serves as a valuable resource for developing and deploying rock-solid Perl applications. *There is no direct competition for an advanced and comprehensive debugging book.

* The first book focused solely on data parsing, a task commonly deemed Perl’s greatest strength * Couples an introduction to data parsing concepts and techniques with practical instruction regarding the key Perl modules capable of facilitating often complex parsing tasks * The author, Christopher Frenz, is a bioinformaticist and expert on Perl and scientific computing

Perl was originally written by Larry Wall while he was working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs. Larry is an Internet legend, known not just for Perl, but as the author of the UNIX utilities rn, one of the original Usenet newsreaders, and patch, a tremendously useful tool that takes a list of differences between two files and allows you to turn one into the other. The term patch used for this activity is now widespread. Perl started life as a “glue” language for Larry and his officemates, allowing one to “stick” different tools together by converting between their various data formats. It pulled together the best features of several languages: the powerful regular expressions from sed (the Unix stream editor), the patte- scanning language awk, and a few other languages and utilities. The syntax was further made up out of C, Pascal, Basic, Unix shell languages, English, and maybe a few other elements along the way. While Perl started its life as glue, it is now more often likened to another handy multiuse tool: duct tape. A common statement heard in cyberspace is that Perl is the duct tape that holds the Internet together.

* Avoids proof-of-concept examples in favor of teaching readers how to produce well-coded secure CGI applications that will stand up to the demands of being placed into the potentially hostile environment of the Internet. * Takes a holistic approach to web application development and includes instruction on how to use ancillary programs such as Mason and Nagios that the reader will need to be familiar with in order to progress. * The book’s comprehensive scope tackles all the areas of Perl web application development the reader is likely to need in creating their first web applications.

A guide to getting the most out of Perl covers such topics as productivity hacks, user interaction, data munging, working with modules, object hacks, and debugging.