DARKS GÝFT FOR YOU Teach Yourself
Perl 5
in 21 days
In your first week of learning Perl, you'll learn enough of the basics of Perl to write many useful Perl programs. Here's a summary of what you'll learn in Week 1:
Day 1, "Getting Started," tells you how to get Perl, how to run Perl programs, and how to read from your keyboard and write to your screen.
Day 2, "Basic Operators and Control Flow," teaches you about simple arithmetic, how to assign a value to a scalar variable, and how to control execution using conditional statements.
Day 3, "Understanding Scalar Values," teaches you about integers, floating-point numbers, and character strings. It also shows you that all three are interchangeable in Perl.
Day 4, "More Operators," tells you all about operators and expressions in Perl and talks about operator associativity and precedence.
Day 5, "Lists and Array Variables," introduces you to lists, which are collections of values, and to array variables, which store lists.
Day 6, "Reading from and Writing to Files," tells you how to interact with your file system by reading from input files, writing to output files, and testing for particular file attributes.
Day 7, "Pattern Matching," describes pattern-matching in Perl and shows how you can substitute values and translate sets of characters in text strings.
By the end of Week 2, you'll have mastered almost all the features of Perl; you'll also have learned about many of the library functions supplied with the language. Here's a summary of what you'll learn:
Day 8, "More Control Structures," discusses the control flow statements not previously covered.
Day 9, "Using Subroutines," shows how you can break your program into smaller, more manageable, chunks.
Day 10, "Associative Arrays," introduces one of the most powerful and useful constructs in Perl-arrays-and it shows how you can use these arrays to simulate other data structures.
Day 11, "Formatting Your Output," shows how you can use Perl to produce tidy reports.
Day 12, "Working with the File System," shows how you can interact with your system's directory structure.
Day 13, "Process, String, and Mathematical Functions," describes the library functions that interact with processes running on the system. It also describes the functions that perform trigonometric and other mathematical operations, and the functions that operate on strings.
Day 14, "Scalar-Conversion and List-Manipulation Functions," describes the library functions that convert values from one form to another and the functions that work with lists and array variables.
By the end of Week 3, you'll know all the features and capabilities of Perl. It covers the rest of the Perl library functions and describes some of the more esoteric concepts of the language. Here's a summary of what you'll learn:
Day 15, "System Functions," describes the functions that manipulate the Berkeley UNIX and UNIX System V environments.
Day 16, "Command-Line Options," describes the options you can supply with Perl to control how your program runs.
Day 17, "System Variables," describes the built-in variables that are included automatically as part of every Perl program.
Day 18, "References in Perl 5," describes the pointer and reference features of Perl 5, including multi-dimensional arrays.
Day 19, "Object-Oriented Programming in Perl," describes the object-oriented capabilities added to Perl 5. These enable you to hide information and divide your program into individual file modules.
Day 20, "Miscellaneous Features of Perl," covers some of the more exotic or obscure features of the language.
Day 21, "The Perl Debugger," shows you how to use the Perl debugger to discover errors quickly.