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’re ready to get started with Perl 6, this is the book you want, whether you’re a programmer, system administrator, or web hacker. Perl 6 is a new language—a modern reinvention of Perl suitable for almost any task, from short fixes to complete web applications. This hands-on tutorial gets you started.

Author brian d foy (Mastering Perl) provides a sophisticated introduction to this new programming language. Each chapter in this guide contains exercises to help you practice what you learn as you learn it. Other books may teach you to program in Perl 6, but this book will turn you into a Perl 6 programmer.

Learn how to work with:

• Numbers, strings, blocks, and positionals
• Files and directories and input/output
• Associatives, subroutines, classes, and roles
• Junctions and sets
• Regular expressions and built-in grammars
• Concurrency features: Promises, supplies, and channels
• Controlling external programs and other advanced features

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

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.