Raku Fundamentals

Gain the skills to begin developing Raku applications from the ground up in this hands-on compact book, which includes a foreword from Larry Wall, creator of Perl. You’ll learn enough to get started building with Raku, using Raku’s gradual typing, handy object orientated features, powerful parsing capabilities, and human-usable concurrency. This book has been updated to include the latest version of Raku based upon the Perl 6.d major version which includes over 3,400 new commits in its specification.  

After a short introduction, each chapter develops a small example project, explaining the Raku features used. When the example is done, you’ll explore another aspect, such as optimizing further for readability or testing the code. Along the way you’ll see Raku basics, such as variables and scoping; subroutines; classes and objects; regexes; and code testing.  

When you’ve mastered the basics, Raku Fundamentals moves onto more advanced topics to give you a deeper understanding of the language. You’ll learn, amongst other things, how to work with persistent storage, how to generate good error messages, and how to write tricky applications such as a file and directory usage graph and a Unicode search tool. 

What You Will Learn

• Get coding with latest version of Raku
• Work on several hands-on examples and projects

Integrate Python libraries into your Raku-based programs

• Parse INI files using regexes and grammars
• Build a date-time converter 
• Carry out refactoring and other automated tests

Who This Book Is For 

If you already know one or more programming languages, and want to learn about Raku, then this book is for you.

Table of Contents

1. What Is Raku?

2. Running Rakudo

3. Formatting a Sudoku Puzzle

4. Datetime Conversion for the Command Line

5. Testing say()

6. Silent-Cron: A Cron Wrapper

7. Stateful Silent-Cron

8. Review of the Raku Basics

9. Parsing INI Files Using Regexes and Grammars

10. A File and Directory Usage Graph

11. A Unicode Search Tool

12. Creating a Web Service and Declarative APIs

13. What’s Next?

About the Author

Moritz Lenz is a Perl 6, now Raku, core developer. He has contributed significantly to the official test suite, the Rakudo Perl compiler, and is the initiator of the official Raku documentation project. He has also authored several modules, and runs infrastructure for the Raku community. In his day job, he develops Perl 5 and Python code, and maintains a continuous delivery system for his employer.