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.
brian d foy has been an instructor for Stonehenge Consulting Services since 1998, a Perl user since he was a physics graduate student, and a die-hard Mac user since he first owned a computer. He founded the first Perl user group, the New York Perl Mongers, as well as the Perl advocacy nonprofit Perl Mongers, Inc., which helped form more than 200 Perl user groups across the globe. He maintains the perlfaq portions of the core Perl documentation, several modules on CPAN, and some stand-alone scripts. He's the publisher of The Perl Review, a magazine devoted to Perl, and is a frequent speaker at conferences including the Perl Conference, Perl University, MarcusEvans BioInformatics '02, and YAPC. His writings on Perl appear in The O'Reilly Network, The Perl Journal, Dr. Dobbs, and The Perl Review, on use.perl.org, and in several Perl usenet groups.
