Advanced Perl Programming

Course Code - IB-101 Duration - 2 Days

This course is for those who already have strong knowledge of Perl's techniques for handling control structures, data structures such as arrays and hashes, text file processing and regular expressions, as provided by the course 'Perl Programming & Applications' ('IB-103').

A large part of the course deals with Perl's approach to handling complex data structures, including implementing object-oriented programming in Perl. The course extends consideration of the use of references and modules well beyond that provided in the course 'Perl Programming and Applications', as well as exploring typeglobs. These techniques are then used to underpin detailed examination of object-oriented programming in Perl, including the tie function and closures.

The last part of the course covers advanced and miscellaneous functions, constructs and issues not covered in depth in 'Perl Programming & Applications' ('IB-103').

Course Content

References & Typeglobs

• Basics Revisited
• References and Dereferencing
• Multidimensional Arrays via References

Reference Constructs & Functions

• Dimension of anonymous lists
• Use of '{' and '}' in dereferencing
• Symbolic References
• Variables or Blocks as Variable Names
• Infix operator.'->'
• - ref() function
• Sorting an array of references

Advanced Data Structure Examples

• Anonymous Hashes
• Hashes containing Array References
• Arrays containing hash references
• Selecting the appropriate data structure
• Complex and nested data structures

Typeglobs

• Typeglobs, local() and my()
• Applying Typeglob Aliasing
• Typeglobs and References
• Typeglobs and Filehandles

Packages & Modules

• Namespaces & Packages
• package keyword
• use and require
• Using the :: notation
• Support for Perl 4 single-quote notation
• @INC array - lib module

The Standard Library

• Time modules
• Bechmark.pm
• Config.pm
• File/directory standard library modules: File::Basename, File::Copy, File::Find, File::Path

The CPAN

Modules

• Invoking modules
• Specialised import lists
• Module semantics
• import function
• Multiple packages in a module Related Issues
• BEGIN...END Blocks
• AUTOLOADing

Object-Oriented Programming

• Background to Object-Orientation
• Accessing Object Methods
• Class Methods and Attributes
• bless() function
• The -> notation and variations
• Perl-Style Inheritance, @ISA Special Array
• Polymorphism
• Introduction to the tie command
• Private data via Closures

Miscellaneous Functions & Keywords

• Random Numbers
• srand, rand, eval
• Immediate and Delayed Execution
• Exception Handling
• pack and unpack
• Advanced array functions

Other Miscellaneous Functions

More Advanced Regular Expressions

• Backreferences
• study function

Other Issues

• Visual Perl.tk module

Pragmas

Introduction to Perl Security

• Data Tainting
• Safe and Penguin modules

Introduction to Perl & other Languages

• C from Perl
• Embedding Perl

Processes, Signals, Pipes & Socket Basics Threads basics

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