* 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

* 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

*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.

This second edition of Grune and Jacobs’ brilliant work presents new developments and discoveries that have been made in the field. Parsing, also referred to as syntax analysis, has been and continues to be an essential part of computer science and linguistics. Parsing techniques have grown considerably in importance, both in computer science, ie. advanced compilers often use general CF parsers, and computational linguistics where such parsers are the only option. They are used in a variety of software products including Web browsers, interpreters in computer devices, and data compression programs; and they are used extensively in linguistics.

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

Perl soared to popularity as a language for creating and managing web content, but with LWP (Library for WWW in Perl), Perl is equally adept at consuming information on the Web. LWP is a suite of modules for fetching and processing web pages.The Web is a vast data source that contains everything from stock prices to movie credits, and with LWP all that data is just a few lines of code away. Anything you do on the Web, whether it's buying or selling, reading or writing, uploading or downloading, news to e-commerce, can be controlled with Perl and LWP. You can automate Web-based purchase orders as easily as you can set up a program to download MP3 files from a web site.Perl & LWP covers: Understanding LWP and its design Fetching and analyzing URLs Extracting information from HTML using regular expressions and tokens Working with the structure of HTML documents using trees Setting and inspecting HTTP headers and response codes Managing cookies Accessing information that requires authentication Extracting links Cooperating with proxy caches Writing web spiders (also known as robots) in a safe fashion Perl & LWP includes many step-by-step examples that show how to apply the various techniques. Programs to extract information from the web sites of BBC News, Altavista, ABEBooks.com, and the Weather Underground, to name just a few, are explained in detail, so that you understand how and why they work.Perl programmers who want to automate and mine the web can pick up this book and be immediately productive. Written by a contributor to LWP, and with a foreword by one of LWP's creators, Perl & LWP is the authoritative guide to this powerful and popular toolkit.

Whether one is an amateur programmer or knows a wide range of algorithms in other languages, this book will illustrate how to carry out traditional programming tasks in a high-powered, efficient, easy-to-maintain manner with Perl. Topics range in complexity from sorting and searching to statistical algorithms, numerical analysis, and encryption.