Perl Programming & Application

Course Code - IB-103 Duration - 4 Days

Because if its ability for dealing with large amounts of data at speed, Perl has become widely used for scanning text files and extracting information.

The capabilities of Perl have been applied by a wide range of professionals in both systems support and programming fields for various applications including manipulating data, parsing, generating HTML, database access and CGI programming.

This 4-day course provides a comprehensive introduction to the major aspects of the Perl programming language and the typical applications which make use of it, especially CGI and accessing databases.

Follow-on Courses

Those who want to learn about further Perl constructs, in particular Perl's approach to complex data structures and object-oriented programming, should attend our 2-day course 'Advanced Perl Programming' ('IB-101').

Who Should Attend

Anyone who needs to build a firm foundation in the language and gain an introduction to the capabilities of Perl in the areas of CGI Programming and Database access.

Prerequisites

Attendees should have programming experience with any language that uses C-like syntax such as C, C++, Java or JavaScript.

Those without experience in a C-like language should attend the course 'Fundamentals for Perl Programming' ('IB-102'). It is recommended that programmers who have experience in languages such as Visual Basic, Pascal or Delphi attend 'Fundamentals for Perl Programming' ('IB-102') before taking this course.

Attendees should have an understanding of the concepts and use of literals and variables, expressions and operators, including precedence and associativity, if.else statements and looping statements using both while and for keywords.

Course Content

Basics

• Program structure
• Standard input, output and error
• Input and output functions and constructs

Data types, expressions, operators

• Integers, floats, strings
• Scalars, variables, assignment and scope
• Creating expressions using operators
• Conversion functions

Basic control structures

• Relational expressions
• if and related tests
• Looping
• Simple subroutines

Other control structures

• Expression modifiers
• Using logical operators as control structures
• foreach with ranges
• Labels and other loop constructs

Normal arrays & lists

• Defining normal arrays
• Assigning and extracting values
• foreach with arrays
• Array dimensions, extending and reducing arrays...pop, shift, push, unshift
• Other array functions: sort, reverse, split, join

Functions & advanced subroutines

• Creating your own functions and subroutines
• return value
• Passing arguments.the @_ array
• my() and local() functions

Associative arrays or hashes

• Defining associative arrays
• Assigning and extracting hash elements
• Associative array functions...key, values, each, exists, delete

Reading & writing text files

• Filehandles and opening and closing files
• Reading/writing data
• die, warn, exit and the special variable $!
• File tests, e.g. -x FILENAME

Special variables

• Global special variables
• Array and hash special variables
• Regular and per-filehandle special vars.

File & Directory Manipulation

• Emulating operating systems commands
• Globbing and directory handles format & the write() function
• Defining a format
• Invoking a format...the write() function
• Top-of-page format
• Changing the filehandle using select()

Regular expressions

• Match operators and range operators
• Metacharacters
• Alternation, grouping, character classes and multipliers

Text processing & manipulation

• Simple string functions
• Advanced string functions
• Substitution operator
• Transliteration operator
• Regular expression backreferences
• Advanced array functions. splice, map, grep
• using @ARGV for multi-file processing
• in-place editing

Introduction to references

• Creating references; dereferencing
• Multidimensional arrays via references
• Anonymous data structures
• More complex data structures

Packages & module basics

• package, use and require keywords
• standard library modules and examples
• specialised import lists
• The CPAN

Perl & CGI programming

• The CGI specification
• Using Perl with a web server program
• Preparing a Perl program for web server use
• CGI.pm and related modules
• Unbundling data from the client
• Sending dynamic HTML documents
• Multiple data items
• Multi-page applications

Real & pseudo-database processing

• Unix DBM databases and DBM hashes
• SDBM_File.pm
• Pseudo databases
• Database modules: DBI/DBD - Win32::ODBC
• Combining CGI and database access

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