A revision of Quigley's popular introductory programming book, updated to reflect Perl's continuing evolution.

Part of the fun of programming in Perl lies in tackling tedious tasks with short, efficient, and reusable code. Often, the perfect tool is the one-liner, a small but powerful program that fits in one line of code and does one thing really well. In Perl One-Liners, author and impatient hacker Peteris Krumins takes you through more than 100 compelling one-liners that do all sorts of handy things, such as manipulate line spacing, tally column values in a table, and get a list of users on a system. This cookbook of useful, customizable, and fun scripts will even help hone your Perl coding skills, as Krumins dissects the code to give you a deeper understanding of the language. You'll find one-liners that: * Encode, decode, and convert strings * Generate random passwords * Calculate sums, factorials, and the mathematical constants π and e * Add or remove spaces * Number lines in a file * Print lines that match a specific pattern * Check to see if a number is prime with a regular expression * Convert IP address to decimal form * Replace one string with another And many more! Save time and sharpen your coding skills as you learn to conquer those pesky tasks in a few precisely placed keystrokes with Perl One-Liners.

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.

Covers advanced features of Perl, how the Perl interpreter works, and presents areas of modern computing technology such as networking, user interfaces, persistence, and code generation.

This book offers a collection of 256 guidelines on the art of coding to help you write better Perl code--in fact, the best Perl code you possibly can. The guidelines cover code layout, naming conventions, choice of data and control structures, program decomposition, interface design and implementation, modularity, object orientation, error handling, testing, and debugging. - Publisher

Most Perl programmers were originally trained as C and Unix programmers, so the Perl programs that they write bear a strong resemblance to C programs. However, Perl incorporates many features that have their roots in other languages such as Lisp. These advanced features are not well understood and are rarely used by most Perl programmers, but they are very powerful. They can automate tasks in everyday programming that are difficult to solve in any other way. One of the most powerful of these techniques is writing functions that manufacture or modify other functions. For example, instead of writing ten similar functions, a programmer can write a general pattern or framework that can then create the functions as needed according to the pattern. For several years Mark Jason Dominus has worked to apply functional programming techniques to Perl. Now Mark brings these flexible programming methods that he has successfully taught in numerous tutorials and training sessions to a wider audience.* Introduces powerful programming methodsnew to most Perl programmersthat were previously the domain of computer scientists* Gradually builds up confidence by describing techniques of progressive sophistication* Shows how to improve everyday programs and includes numerous engaging code examples to illustrate the methods

Many neophyte programmers now begin their careers by learning the metalanguage, Perl. But the books currently available on Perl assume their readers already understand the basics of writing and designing programs--when in fact they do not. The tutorial teaches programming right along with the particulars of Perl syntax, as well as good style and structure and maintainability of the code.