Perl Maven Tutorial

The Perl Maven tutorial book and screencast series teach you how to get your job done regardless if you are a system administrator, working as a build engineer, doing test automation or developing a web application.

The tutorials are available for free online, extended versions are available for purchase as PDF files. The companion screencast series include over 250 individual lessons totaling more than 8 hours of video.

• Beginner Perl Maven
  • How to install Perl, how to run scripts
  • Basic I/O
  • Scalar values and variables (numbers and strings)
  • Accessing files
  • Control flow (if, while, foreach)
  • Lists and arrays (context)
  • Functions, subroutines
  • Hash (associative arrays)
  • Regular expressions, pattern matching
  • Interaction with the file system
  • Error handling
  • Processes and Signals
  • Using existing procedural modules
  • Using existing OOP style modules from CPAN
  • Installing modules on UNIX/Linux and on Windows systems
• Advanced Perl Maven
  • Creating Libraries and Modules
  • Packages, Namespaces
  • Exporting selected functions
  • Writing Unit Tests for Perl Modules
  • Packaging modules for distribution
  • Object Oriented Perl (OOP) manually and using Moose
  • Constructors and destructors
  • Class methods and Instance methods
  • Members
  • Inheritance, Polymorhism, Encapsulation
  • Automatic Class creation
  • Singleton

Some other advanced topics

A mix of advanced topics

1. Throwing exceptions in Perl
2. Catching exceptions in Perl
3. Always use strict and warnings
4. Variable declaration in Perl
5. Symbolic references in Perl
6. Barewords in Perl
7. How to handle warnings in an application?
8. splain and use diagnostics
9. Fatal warnings
10. Array and hash slices
11. splice
12. AUTOLOAD
13. BEGIN and END
14. Schwartzian transformation
15. use autodie
16. Perl::Critic
17. Avoid unwanted bitwise operators using Perl::Critic
18. Perl::Tidy
19. Saved variable: local
20. Who is calling? caller
21. Logging with Log::Dispatch
22. Time and date with DateTime
23. Filtering with grep in Perl
24. Transforming a perl array using the map function
25. Signals and the kill function
26. default scalar variable of Perl

References

1. Introduction to References
2. Anonymous Arrays and Hashes
3. Multi Dimensional Data Structures
4. Manipulating Complex Data Structures
5. References to functions
6. Anonymous functions
7. Memoization
8. Data serialization
9. Practical use of function references

Related writings

A number of posts and screencasts that are not part of the tutorial but that can be very useful for both beginners and advanced Perl developers.

• Using the built-in debugger of Perl
• Using the built-in debugger of Perl as REPL
• Contributing to a Perl module on CPAN (using vim and Github)
• Fetching data from YouTube using Perl

Popular articles

• What is Perl used for?
• Creating beautiful charts and graphs with Perl
• Preparing a Perl application for distribution

What is new in perl 5.10

While Perl 5.10 is not new any more, many companies are only now moving from 5.6.x or 5.8.x to a newer version of perl. It is very beneficial for them to see the features they can use in the newer versions of Perl.

• Regular Expressions in Perl 5.10
• Switching in Perl 5.10 (switch, case, given)
• Smart Matching in Perl 5.10
• What's new in Perl 5.10? say, //, state

Testing

• TAP - The Test Anything Protocol
• Testing a simple Perl Module
• Testing a Web application without a lot of setup

Related external links

• Padre, the Perl editor that is used in the screencast
• You can download Perl including the Perl editor and all the CPAN modules you will need for working through this tutorial