Training

Training

Introduction to Perl

Course Description

This 2-day course is an introduction to programming in Perl. Starting with the absolute basics, attendees will be writing useful programs by the end of the course. This course includes classroom presentations and practical exercises.

Intended Audience

This course is for anybody that wants to write programs in Perl. Attendees need no previous knowledge of Perl although it will be useful if they understand a little about programming. Whether you are a system administrator wanting to use Perl as a glue language, a programmer who wants to use it for data munging or someone who wants to write web applications, this course will give you the basic knowledge you need.

Key Skills

After completing this course you will be able to:

  • Write simple but useful Perl programs
  • Use Perl’s built-in operators and functions
  • Use loops and subroutines to simplify your programs
  • Understand simple regular expressions
  • Find and install third-party libraries

Course Outline

  1. What is Perl
    • Perl’s name
    • Typical uses of Perl
    • What is Perl like?
    • The Perl Philosophy
  2. Creating and running a Perl program
    • Hello World
    • Running a Perl program
    • Comments
    • Command line options
  3. Variables
    • What is a variable?
    • Variable names
    • Types of Perl variable – scalars arrays and hashes
    • Declaring variables
    • Scalars, arrays and hashes in detail
    • Perl’s special variables
  4. Input and Output
    • The print function
    • The file input operator
  5. Operators and Functions
    • What are operators and functions?
    • Various types of operators
    • Some useful functions
  6. Conditional Constructs
    • Introduction to Boolean expressions
    • if, elseif and else
    • while, until, for and foreach
  7. Subroutines
    • What are subroutines?
    • Defining subroutines
    • Calling subroutines
    • Subroutine arguments
    • Subroutine return values
  8. Regular Expressions
    • What are regular expressions?
    • The match, substitution and binding operators
    • Metacharacters and quantifiers
  9. Smart Matching
    • The smart match operator
    • What is smart matching?
  10. Finding and Using Modules
    • What is a module?
    • What is CPAN?
    • Installing modules
    • Using modules
    • Some useful modules
  11. Further Information
    • Books
    • Web sites
    • Mailing lists
    • The Perl community

Course Duration

2 days.

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Dave Cross

Dave Cross

Course Instructor

Dave Cross is a well known and much respected Perl author, instructor and consultant.

In 1998 Dave started london.pm which has grown to be one of the largest Perl Mongers groups in the world.

He nominally led the group until September 2001. Between August 2002 and June 2006 he was the Perl Mongers User Groups Co-ordinator for the Perl Foundation.

Dave is a regular speaker at Perl and Open Source conferences and is often invited to present tutorials alongside the main conference.

He is the author of "Data Munging with Perl" (Manning, 2001) and a co-author of "Perl Template Toolkit" (O'Reilly, 2003).