Perl Tutorial
About the instructor
William R. Ward has been a Perl instructor at De Anza College in Cupertino, California since June 1999. He is the former Manager of Training for Cellmania, Inc., where he designed and delivered enterprise mobile business platform training. He has also delivered Perl tutorials as part of Silicon Valley’s celebrated Mindsource Software Engineers “lunchtime BOF” series.
About the class
Spend your Saturday learning the ins and outs of Perl. Extensive introduction to Perl, with lab exercises. Covers beginning through intermediate Perl language skills, such as manipulating files and directories, regular expressions, Perl data structures, good programming practices, and more. The class covers the following topics:
| Introduction | History of Perl Philosophy of Perl Architecture Hello World and other code examples |
|---|---|
| Scalars | Literal scalar values (Numbers and Strings) Creating and accessing scalar variables Numeric and String Operators Functions for manipulating scalars |
| Flow control: Loops and Conditionals | if/elsif/else, while, for, foreach, do/while Using unless and until Suffix style syntax for loops Jumping around in loops Looping idioms |
| Running and debugging Perl | Perl command line Program arguments Using strict and warnings Debugging techniques Style suggestions Online documentation |
| Lists and Arrays | Creating a list List functions Creating and accessing arrays Array slices Array functions Converting between arrays and scalars |
| Hashes | Creating and accessing hashes Hash slices Hash functions Hash loop idioms |
| Regular Expressions | Regular Expressions in Perl Anchoring regular expressions Matching groups of characters Specifying how many Alternation Grouping and Memorization Regular Expression Modifiers Alternative delimiters |
| Files and Directories | Opening Files Reading and writing files “open or die” Built-in Filehandles Pipes Reading Directories and Globbing File Test Operators |
| Subroutines | Why subroutines Defining and calling subroutines Passing and returning values Scalar and list context |
| Perl Modules | What is a Perl module? Types of modules Using a module Writing a module Installing modules |
Prerequisites
- The course does not assume any prior Perl knowledge. However, it assumes you can do basic text editing and understand fundamentals of writing scripts or programs, including the basic concepts of variables and arrrays.
- Some programming experience is strongly recommended, in a language such as C, C++, Java, Javascript, or Linux/Unix shell scripting.
Schedule:
Weekend courses are held on Saturdays from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM with a one hour break for lunch from noon to 1:00 PM. Light snacks and beverages are included. The course consists of approximately 4-5 hours of lecture and 3-4 hours of lab time (spread out throughout the day). Each student has his or her own workstation for the lab exercises.