CGI + Perl

If you’re just getting started with Perl, this is the book you want—whether you’re a programmer, system administrator, or web hacker. Nicknamed "the Llama" by two generations of users, this bestseller closely follows the popular introductory Perl course taught by the authors since 1991. This seventh edition covers recent changes to the language up to version 5.24.

Perl is suitable for almost any task on almost any platform, from short fixes to complete web applications. Learning Perl teaches you the basics and shows you how to write programs up to 128 lines long—roughly the size of 90% of the Perl programs in use today. Each chapter includes exercises to help you practice what you’ve just learned. Other books may teach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.

Topics include:

• Perl data and variable types
• Subroutines
• File operations
• Regular expressions
• String manipulation (including Unicode)
• Lists and sorting
• Process management
• Smart matching
• Use of third party modules

Adopted as the undisputed Perl bible soon after the first edition appeared in 1991, Programming Perl is still the go-to guide for this highly practical language. Perl began life as a super-fueled text processing utility, but quickly evolved into a general purpose programming language that’s helped hundreds of thousands of programmers, system administrators, and enthusiasts, like you, get your job done.

In this much-anticipated update to "the Camel," three renowned Perl authors cover the language up to its current version, Perl 5.14, with a preview of features in the upcoming 5.16. In a world where Unicode is increasingly essential for text processing, Perl offers the best and least painful support of any major language, smoothly integrating Unicode everywhere—including in Perl’s most popular feature: regular expressions.

Important features covered by this update include:

• New keywords and syntax
• I/O layers and encodings
• New backslash escapes
• Unicode 6.0
• Unicode grapheme clusters and properties
• Named captures in regexes
• Recursive and grammatical patterns
• Expanded coverage of CPAN
• Current best practices

If you have a Perl programming question, you'll find the answer quickly in this handy, easy-to-use quick reference. The Perl Pocket Reference condenses and organizes stacks of documentation down to the most essential facts, so you can find what you need in a heartbeat.

Updated for Perl 5.14, the 5th edition provides a summary of Perl syntax rules and a complete list of operators, built-in functions, and other features. It's the perfect companion to O'Reilly's authoritative and in-depth Perl programming books, including Learning Perl, Programming Perl, and the Perl Cookbook..

If you're just getting started with Perl, this is the book you want—whether you're a programmer, system administrator, or web hacker. Nicknamed "the Llama" by two generations of users, this bestseller closely follows the popular introductory Perl course taught by the authors since 1991. This 6th edition covers recent changes to the language up to version 5.14.

Perl is suitable for almost any task on almost any platform, from short fixes to complete web applications. Learning Perl teaches you the basics and shows you how to write programs up to 128 lines long—roughly the size of 90% of the Perl programs in use today. Each chapter includes exercises to help you practice what you've just learned. Other books may teach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.

Topics include:

• Perl data and variable types
• Subroutines
• File operations
• Regular expressions
• String manipulation (including Unicode)
• Lists and sorting
• Process management
• Smart matching
• Use of third party modules

Part of the fun of programming in Perl lies in tackling tedious tasks with short, efficient, and reusable code. Often, the perfect tool is the one-liner, a small but powerful program that fits in one line of code and does one thing really well.

In Perl One-Liners, author and impatient hacker Peteris Krumins takes you through more than 100 compelling one-liners that do all sorts of handy things, such as manipulate line spacing, tally column values in a table, and get a list of users on a system. This cookbook of useful, customizable, and fun scripts will even help hone your Perl coding skills, as Krumins dissects the code to give you a deeper understanding of the language.

You'll find one-liners that:

• Encode, decode, and convert strings
• Generate random passwords
• Calculate sums, factorials, and the mathematical constants π and e
• Add or remove spaces
• Number lines in a file
• Print lines that match a specific pattern
• Check to see if a number is prime with a regular expression
• Convert IP address to decimal form
• Replace one string with another

Find a Perl programmer, and you'll find a copy of Perl Cookbook nearby. Perl Cookbook is a comprehensive collection of problems, solutions, and practical examples for anyone programming in Perl. The book contains hundreds of rigorously reviewed Perl "recipes" and thousands of examples ranging from brief one-liners to complete applications.The second edition of Perl Cookbook has been fully updated for Perl 5.8, with extensive changes for Unicode support, I/O layers, mod_perl, and new technologies that have emerged since the previous edition of the book. Recipes have been updated to include the latest modules. New recipes have been added to every chapter of the book, and some chapters have almost doubled in size.Covered topic areas include:

• Manipulating strings, numbers, dates, arrays, and hashes
• Pattern matching and text substitutions
• References, data structures, objects, and classes
• Signals and exceptions
• Screen addressing, menus, and graphical applications
• Managing other processes
• Writing secure scripts
• Client-server programming
• Internet applications programming with mail, news, ftp, and telnet
• CGI and mod_perl programming
• Web programming

This book picks up right where Learning Perl leaves off. With Intermediate Perl, you’ll graduate from short scripts to much larger programs, using features that make Perl a general-purpose language. This gentle but thorough guide introduces you to modules, complex data structures, and object-oriented programming.

Each chapter is small enough to be read in just an hour or two, ending with exercises to help you practice what you’ve learned. If you’re familiar with the material in Learning Perl and have the ambition to go further, Intermediate Perl will teach you most of the core Perl language concepts you need for writing robust programs on any platform.

Topics include:

• Packages and namespaces
• References and scoping, including regular expression references
• Manipulating complex data structures
• Object-oriented programming
• Writing and using modules
• Testing Perl code
• Contributing to CPAN

Just like Learning Perl, material in this book closely follows the popular introductory Perl course the authors have taught since 1991. This second edition covers recent changes to the language up to version 5.14.

Want to learn how to program and think like a computer scientist? This practical guide gets you started on your programming journey with the help of Perl 6, the younger sister of the popular Perl programming language. Ideal for beginners, this hands-on book includes over 100 exercises with multiple solutions, and more than 1,000 code examples so you can quickly practice what you learn. Experienced programmers—especially those who know Perl 5—will also benefit.

Divided into two parts, Think Perl 6 starts with basic concepts that every programmer needs to know, and then focuses on different programming paradigms and some more advanced programming techniques. With two semesters’ worth of lessons, this book is the perfect teaching tool for computer science beginners in colleges and universities.

• Learn basic concepts including variables, expressions, statements, functions, conditionals, recursion, and loops
• Understand commonly used basic data structures and the most useful algorithms
• Dive into object-oriented programming, and learn how to construct your own types and methods to extend the language
• Use grammars and regular expressions to analyze textual content
• Explore how functional programming can help you make your code simpler and more expressive

Many programmers code by instinct, relying on convenient habits or a "style" they picked up early on. They aren't conscious of all the choices they make, like how they format their source, the names they use for variables, or the kinds of loops they use. They're focused entirely on problems they're solving, solutions they're creating, and algorithms they're implementing. So they write code in the way that seems natural, that happens intuitively, and that feels good.

But if you're serious about your profession, intuition isn't enough. Perl Best Practices author Damian Conway explains that rules, conventions, standards, and practices not only help programmers communicate and coordinate with one another, they also provide a reliable framework for thinking about problems, and a common language for expressing solutions. This is especially critical in Perl, because the language is designed to offer many ways to accomplish the same task, and consequently it supports many incompatible dialects.

With a good dose of Aussie humor, Dr. Conway (familiar to many in the Perl community) offers 256 guidelines on the art of coding to help you write better Perl code--in fact, the best Perl code you possibly can. The guidelines cover code layout, naming conventions, choice of data and control structures, program decomposition, interface design and implementation, modularity, object orientation, error handling, testing, and debugging.

They're designed to work together to produce code that is clear, robust, efficient, maintainable, and concise, but Dr. Conway doesn't pretend that this is the one true universal and unequivocal set of best practices. Instead, Perl Best Practices offers coherent and widely applicable suggestions based on real-world experience of how code is actually written, rather than on someone's ivory-tower theories on howsoftware ought to be created.

Most of all, Perl Best Practices offers guidelines that actually work, and that many developers around the world are already using. Much like Perl itself, these guidelines are about helping you to get your job done, without getting in the way.

Praise for Perl Best Practices from Perl community members:

"As a manager of a large Perl project, I'd ensure that every member of my team has a copy of Perl Best Practices on their desk, and use it as the basis for an in-house style guide."-- Randal Schwartz

"There are no more excuses for writing bad Perl programs. All levels of Perl programmer will be more productive after reading this book."-- Peter Scott

"Perl Best Practices will be the next big important book in the evolution of Perl. The ideas and practices Damian lays down will help bring Perl out from under the embarrassing heading of "scripting languages". Many of us have known Perl is a real programming language, worthy of all the tasks normally delegated to Java and C++. With Perl Best Practices, Damian shows specifically how and why, so everyone else can see, too."-- Andy Lester

"Damian's done what many thought impossible: show how to build large, maintainable Perl applications, while still letting Perl be the powerful, expressive language that programmers have loved for years."-- Bill Odom

"Finally, a means to bring lasting order to the process and product of real Perl development teams."-- Andrew Sundstrom