Perl 5 Essentials

Introduction
Welcome
Using the exercise files
Prerequisites
What is Perl?
Installing ActiveState's ActivePerl on Windows
Installing Eclipse on Windows
Installing Eclipse on Mac

1. Perl Quick-Start Guide for Experienced Programmers
Hello World
Counting lines in a file
Using a loop in Perl
Using subroutines in Perl
Using Perl's documentation

2. General Syntax
Understanding how Perl uses whitespace
Terminating statements with semicolons
Creating comments
Best practices for formatting code

3. Variables and Values
Understanding values and variables
Declaring numeric variables
Declaring character string variables
Declaring lists and arrays
Pulling slices from arrays
Understanding hashes and associative arrays
Getting value pairs using the each function
Understanding the undef value

4. Statements and Blocks
Assigning values to variables
Using statements and expressions
Combining statements into blocks
Understanding scope

5. Conditional Statements
Understanding conditional statements
Creating conditionals with if
Extending conditionals with else
Extending conditionals with elsif
Building if statements with postfix conditionals
Creating negative conditionals with unless
Using the ternary conditional operator

6. Loops
Understanding loops
Creating loops with while
Creating loops with until
Iterating lists with foreach
Iterating lists with for
Using loop control statements
Building loops with postfix statements

7. Special Variables
Understanding special variables
Using special variables
Working with special file handles
Using special constants

8. Operators
Performing basic math with arithmetic operators
Creating conditionals with comparison operators
Combining conditionals with logical operators
Reading file metadata with file test operators
Creating a sequence with the range operator
Combining strings with the concatenation operator
Streamlining strings with quote operators
Understanding operator precedence

9. Regular Expressions
Understanding regular expressions
Searching and replacing text with regular expressions
Extracting matches with parentheses
Matching wildcards
Matching classes of characters
Creating arrays with split

10. Subroutines
Understanding subroutines
Defining and calling subroutines
Using arguments with subroutines
Understanding scope and "my" variables
Returning values from a subroutine

11. References and Data Structures
Understanding values and references
Defining array references
Defining hash references
Building mixed data structures

12. File I/O
Understanding streams and files
Using file handles
Using the object-oriented interface for handling files
Working with binary files

13. Built-In Functions
Manipulating strings with built-in functions
Working with numbers
Manipulating lists and arrays with built-in functions
Retrieving and formatting time

14. Modules
Leveraging code with modules
Understanding object-oriented and procedural modules
Creating modules
Understanding object and instance data
Installing modules from CPAN on Mac and Unix
Installing modules from CPAN on Windows

15. Documentation with POD
Understanding POD
Documenting with POD
Exploring a POD document

16. New Features in Perl 5.10
Using Perl 5.10
Displaying text with say
Selecting from multiple choices with given and when
Keeping persistent variables with state

17. Exploring Web Development
Exploring CGI
Using a database
Developing a module library

Conclusion
Goodbye