Perl Programming for Beginners

Intended Audience Although this course can be taken by those who have not programmed before, it is normally the case that Perl is better studied as a second language. For complete beginners (those who have virtually no programming experience) it might be better to start with a language such as JavaScript or PHP. The course does not focus in on any particular application area, and hence will be useful for a variety of Perl users such as Web developers, System Administrators, Bioinformatics application developers and even Database Administrators. Course Overview Perl has been described as a kind of "Swiss Army Knife" of Unix like tools and utilities combined in a scripting language. The purpose of this course is to provide a gentle yet thorough introduction to the language of Perl, and an overview of some of the most useful and commonly encountered Perl modules. All the Perl programming constructs are carefully explained, and a considerable amount of time will be devoted to the difficulat topics such as regular expressions and hashes. Although examples of using Perl modules for Web development and for system administration will be included in the course, these topics are dealt with in depth in more specialised courses. Key Skills Ability to use scalars, arrays and hashes effectively Understanding of modular programming techniques in Perl - based on developing appropriate data structures and the algorithms to manipulate these data structures Confidence in using regular expressions to tackle information retrieval, data transformation and document processing tasks Writing Perl scripts for file system administration Ability to read and modify Perl system administration scripts Practical introduction to the Perl CGI module Practical Work The course will contain many exercises to develop and reinforce the concepts and techniques taught. Towards the end of the course the exercises will be built around an information retrieval and reporting task based on processing log files. Retrieving lines from a file containing particular patterns Using hashes to collect and organised statistical information about the types of events recorded in a log file Formatting the output of a report as a web page Implement a file backup and recovery application Using the values entered on a form to generate a customer reply letter --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Course Contents The Philosophy and Style of Perl Advantages of working with an interpreted language Perl's heritage in Unix Perl's extensibility Large number of Perl modules available for Perl Perl Syntax and style Filehandles for basic Input/Output Statements and declarations Overview of Perl's data types Scalars scalar values string literals metacharacters and quotation in string literals "Here" documents special literals variables and literals Operators arithmetic operators string operators assignment operators autoincrement and autodecrement operators logical operators comparison operators Control structures truth and falsity in Perl if -- elsif -- else statements SWITCH statements while loops and until loops for loops and foreach loops breaking out of loops with next and last Regular expressions Arrays, Hashes, Typeglobs and Context arrays and list values associative arrays (hashes) scalar and list contexts void context interpolative context typeglobs and filehandles Input operators backquote operator (command input) angle operator (line input) filename globbing operator Regular expressions and pattern matching - advanced treatment rules or regexp pattern matching regular expression extensions pattern-matching operators Scope rules global declarations scoped declarations Subroutines passing arguments returning values localising variables using my and local passing symbol table entries (typeglobs) passing references prototypes Generating formatted output using the printf subroutine using format and write Perl special variables - an overview filehandle special variables regular expression special variables global special variables global special arrays Overview of Perl's built in functions for manipulating scalars regular expressions and pattern matching numeric function computation array processing list processing hash processing input / output processing fixed length data and records working with filehandles, files and directories controlling flow of a script scoping performing system/process level tasks constructing and using modules constructing classes and objects interprocess communication obtaining user and group information obtaining network information socket programming time handling Introduction to Perl Packages overview of references and nested data structures overview of references and objects packages, modules and object classes working with the Standard Perl library obtaining modules from the CPAN archive