Professional Perl Programming [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

~ (Author), Aldo Calpini (Author), Arthur Corliss (Author), Juan Julian Merelo Guervos (Author), Chris Nandor (Author), Aalhad Saraf (Author), Shelley Powers (Author), Simon Cozens (Author), JJ Merelo-Guervos (Author), Aalhad Saraf (Author), Chris Nandor (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Perl is one of the most important and powerful languages available today, and Professional Perl Programming offers an in-depth guide to exploiting some of its best features. With a densely packed tutorial straight from the experts, it is suitable for any experienced developer who wants to get more from this language.

Weighing in at over 1,200 pages, the text is dedicated to the principle that more is more, yet in covering the breadth of today's Perl, it doesn't ever lose sight of the practical details. One of the best feautures is its attention to running Perl in multiple environments. Early sections look at installing and running Perl on Unix, Windows, and the Mac. There is plenty of advice on how to run and deploy scripts, including excellent sections on the internals of Perl, autoloading modules, and creating installable modules for distribution.

A practical, hands-on focus is the rule throughout this text, which features short code excerpts rather than full-length scripts. Early sections cover pretty much the entire Perl language in significant detail, from data types (including scalars, arrays, and hashes, which help give Perl its distinctive personality) to flow control statements and their scoping rules. An important chapter presents object-oriented Perl, including common class design constructs like inheritance.

The emphasis of much of this book is on detailing the use of key Perl modules to perform basic and important tasks like file I/O, working with files and directories, process control, and networking. One notable section covers regular expressions with a clearly presented (yet sophisticated) tutorial to this essential Perl feature. (Besides the fundamentals, the book examines optimizing your regular expressions for better performance.) Later sections show you how to do networking in Perl, as well as how to get Perl to interoperate with C and even Java. The book closes with a concise listing of available Perl functions, as well as the most important Perl modules.

Professional Perl Programming doesn't dumb the subject down. Perl is infinitely rich and sometimes difficult, and this book is up to the task. It succeeds at presenting a wide-ranging tour of today's Perl with enough information to please even experienced Perl programmers. It contains much to mine in the way of basic and expert material that any intermediate to advanced developer can use to do more with Perl in everyday programming projects. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

• Introduction to Perl distributions and modules
• Running Perl on Unix, Windows, and other platforms
• Intensive programming tutorial for Perl
• Numbers and strings
• Perl operators in detail
• Using scalars, lists, arrays, and hashes
• Complex data structures and typeglobs
• Expressions
• Statements and blocks
• Flow control and loops
• Subroutines
• Scope and visibility rules in Perl
• Including and using Perl modules
• Autoloading modules
• Creating installable modules
• In-depth tutorial for regular expressions (including performance tips)
• Perl file I/O and file handles (including working with files and directories)
• Command-line handling and shells
• Terminal I/O
• Warnings and errors in Perl
• Using the Perl debugger
• Automated testing and profiling
• Text processing and reporting in Perl
• Object-oriented Perl (including basic object-oriented class design features like inheritance)
• Perl internals
• Integrating Perl with C, Java, and COM
• Creating and managing processes in Perl (including signals, IPC, and threads)
• Perl networking (from sockets to higher-level Internet protocols)
• Techniques for writing portable Perl code
• Unicode support
• Locale and internationalization techniques in Perl
• Function reference for Perl 5.6
• Listing of standard Perl modules

Product Description

Perl is one of the most important scripting languages in use today. Open source, freely available, portable, versatile, and robust, powerful and easy to use, Perl is the first choice for thousands of professional web developers. But Perl is far more than a scripting language for the web. Supported by a comprehensive standard library and hundreds of third-party libraries, Perl is an increasingly popular choice for application programming.

This book provides comprehensive coverage of the Perl language. It covers the fundamentals of data types and file handling through advanced features like regular expressions, object-oriented programming, threads, internationalization, and integrating Perl with the C programming language. The latest version of the language, Perl 5.6, is used throughout, with commentary for those with earlier versions.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 1215 pages
• Publisher: Peer Information; 1st edition (February 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861004494
• ISBN-13: 978-1861004499
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.2 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,343,905 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended for a broad audience, May 10, 2002

By	Marco Forster (Männedorf, ZH Schweiz) - See all my reviews

This is a very good Perl book! For beginners, intermediates or even advanced programmers in Perl. The book takes you from the basics to advanced applied Perl programming concepts.
The book manages what many others fail to do: It might be the only Perl book you ever need. If you worked through this book, additional information is readily available on the Internet. This book is comprehensive enough to cover everything you need to know about the Perl language to write large scale 'mission critical' applications.
Admitted, if you already own the O'Reillys 'Learning Perl', 'Perl' and 'Perl Cookbook' this book will not contain many news. However, it is written very well and it is understandable, something I cannot always say about the 'original' Perl books or documentation.
If you do web programming, a logical addition to this book is 'Professional Perl Development' which offers lots of good information on how to design sophisiticated web applications.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How did I feel about Professional Perl, February 11, 2001

By	Omanakuttan.N. (Kerala, India.) - See all my reviews

All the books I have read in he programmer to programmer series of Wrox press were excellent. (e.g. PHP).Professional perl is not an exception. This book covers all the aspects of Perl - the hacker language. The book explains very well the basic concepts of perl in the initial chapters, then moves over to advanced features. Chapters 7 to 9 worth special appreciation as well as chapter 11 , in which regex is dealt in a detailed and perspicacious manner. The authers strived hard to give the reader a clear picture of Object Oriented perl and Networking perl, which are the chapters I liked most. The chapter about Unicode (utf8) seems is very well written. I could not decipher what Larry intended to convey before reading this chapter. Even though I felt the book is primarily targetted at Unix and clones users, I am sure that Win32 perl programmers will also get benefitted by this book. The authers could make this more evident by concentrating a little more on the chapter Writing portable perl.Together with Programming Perl ( Larry wall , O'reilly) this book is really an asset for any perl programmer.

Omanakuttan.N.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars very detailed but not easy to read, January 23, 2003

By	mh "991234xh" (Dayton, Ohio) - See all my reviews

The book is very detailed and comprehensive, but it is not easy to read and probably not suitable for beginners. Specifically, it does not provide complete examples with inputs, code, and output. There are also plenty of typos and small errors.

Still, in all fairness, this is a very comprehensive book with lots of topics not covered in other books. Also the paper is of good quality. Probably every advanced user should go through the book to pick up on things other books leave out.