Effective Perl Programming

The Classic Guide to Solving Real-World Problems with Perl Now Fully Updated for Todays Best Idioms!

For years, experienced programmers have relied on Effective Perl Programming to discover better ways to solve problems with Perl. Now, in this long-awaited second edition, three renowned Perl programmers bring together todays best idioms, techniques, and examples: everything you need to write more powerful, fluent, expressive, and succinct code with Perl.

Nearly twice the size of the first edition, Effective Perl Programming, Second Edition, offers everything from rules of thumb to avoid common pitfalls to the latest wisdom for using Perl modules. You wont just learn the right ways to use Perl: You’ll learn why these approaches work so well.

New coverage in this edition includes

• Reorganized and expanded material spanning twelve years of Perl evolution
• Eight new chapters on CPAN, databases, distributions, files and file handles, production Perl, testing, Unicode, and warnings
• Updates for Perl 5.12, the latest version of Perl
• Systematically updated examples reflecting todays best idioms

You’ll learn how to work with strings, numbers, lists, arrays, strictures, namespaces, regular expressions, subroutines, references, distributions, inline code, warnings, Perl::Tidy, data munging, Perl one-liners, and a whole lot more. Every technique is organized in the same Items format that helped make the first edition so convenient and popular.

Table of Contents

1. The Basics of Perl

2. Idiomatic Perl 

3. Regular Expressions

4. Subroutines

5. Files and Filehandles

6. References

7. CPAN

8. Unicode

9. Distributions

10. Testing

11. Warnings

12. Databases

13. Miscellany

Appendix A: Perl Resources

Appendix B: Map from First to Second Edition

About the Author

Joseph N. Hall has programmed for a living since 1984, taught his first computer class at age fourteen, and has worked with Perl since 1993. Joshua A. McAdams, a programmer at Google, is the voice of Perlcast. He has hosted two Perl conferences, conducts meetings for Chicago Perl Mongers, has spoken about Perl at events worldwide, and is a CPAN author. brian d foy is coauthor of Learning Perl, Fifth Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2008), and Intermediate Perl (O’Reilly Media, 2006), and author of Mastering Perl (O’Reilly Media, 2007). He established the first Perl user group, the New York Perl Mongers; publishes The Perl Review; maintains parts of the core Perl documentation; and has more than ten years of Perl training experience.