Mastering Perl

Take the next step toward Perl mastery with advanced concepts that make coding easier, maintenance simpler, and execution faster. Mastering Perl isn’t a collection of clever tricks, but a way of thinking about Perl programming for solving debugging, configuration, and many other real-world problems you’ll encounter as a working programmer.

The third in O’Reilly’s series of landmark Perl tutorials (after Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl), this fully upated edition pulls everything together and helps you bend Perl to your will.

• Explore advanced regular expressions features
• Avoid common problems when writing secure programs
• Profile and benchmark Perl programs to see where they need work
• Wrangle Perl code to make it more presentable and readable
• Understand how Perl keeps track of package variables
• Define subroutines on the fly
• Jury-rig modules to fix code without editing the original source
• Use bit operations and bit vectors to store large data efficiently
• Learn how to detect errors that Perl doesn’t report
• Dive into logging, data persistence, and the magic of tied variables

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Advanced Regular Expressions

Chapter 2. Secure Programming Techniques

Chapter 3. Perl Debuggers

Chapter 4. Profiling Perl

Chapter 5. Benchmarking Perl

Chapter 6. Cleaning Up Perl

Chapter 7. Symbol Tables and Typeglobs

Chapter 8. Dynamic Subroutines

Chapter 9. Modifying and Jury-Rigging Modules

Chapter 10. Configuring Perl Programs

Chapter 11. Detecting and Reporting Errors

Chapter 12. Logging

Chapter 13. Data Persistence

Chapter 14. Working with Pod

Chapter 15. Working with Bits

Chapter 16. The Magic of Tied Variables

Chapter 17. Modules as Programs

Appendix A. Further Reading

Appendix B. brian’s Guide to Solving Any Perl Problem

About the Author

brian d foy is a prolific Perl trainer and writer, and runs The Perl Review to help people use and understand Perl through educational, consulting, code review, and more. He’s a frequent speaker at Perl conferences. He’s the co-author of Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl, and Effective Perl Programming, and the author of Mastering Perl. He was been an instructor and author for Stonehenge Consulting Services from 1998 to 2009, 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.