Understanding Perl Programming

Course Description

The Understanding Perl course is designed to equip participants with practical skills in Perl programming. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, this course will empower you to harness the power of Perl for various tasks, especially in the context of Linux operating systems. By the end of the course, participants will have a solid grasp of Perl’s capabilities and how it remains relevant today. This course would be ideally suited for programmers who know other languages like Python to transition to working with Perl.
3 Days
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Pre-requisites

Knowledge of general programming concepts in any programming language.

Perl Environment

Perl versions
Editor
Runtime environment
CPAN

Organising your code

Perl style guide
.pl files
Subroutines
Creating modules
Using .pm files
Introduction to debugging

Object Oriented Programming in Perl

OOP
Features of an Object Oriented Programming Language
Putting objects into modules
Using objects from modules
Some simple objects

Writing and Calling Perl scripts

Creating a script
Running the script
Handling command line parameters
Understanding streams
Opening a file stream
The UNIX / Linux philosophy for command line utilities
Working with STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR

Regular Expressions

Getting started
Formulating and testing your regular expressions
Core features
Search
Replace
Some intermediate techniques
Some more advanced techniques

OS Operations

Working with the file system
Directory operations
Listing files
Executing OS commands
Getting output from OS commands run using system()

Working with XML Files

Perl modules for XML processing
Extracting data from an XML file
Validating using an XSD
Writing data to an XML file
Transforming XML files using XSLT
Querying XML files using XPATH

Web scraping

Understanding document structure
Parsing a HTML document
Perl modules for scraping
Extract data from a table on a web page into Perl data structures.

More Debugging Techniques

Using print statements
Logging
Writing to STDERR
Debugger

Web Development Overview

How can Perl be used to create a web application?
What is CGI Scripting
A simple web application

Automated Testing

What is automated testing?
Why are tests vital when working with legacy code?
Some simple tests

Best Practices

Coding conventions
Importance of comments
Importance of good variable names
Splitting functionality up into subroutines
Splitting functionality up into modules
DRY - don't repeat yourself
Working with large files
Monitoring memory usage
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