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, Polymorphism, 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. Unknown warnings category
9. splain and use diagnostics
10. Fatal warnings
11. Array and hash slices
12. splice
13. AUTOLOAD
14. BEGIN and END
15. Schwartzian transformation
16. use autodie
17. Perl::Critic
18. Avoid unwanted bitwise operators using Perl::Critic
19. Perl::Tidy
20. Saved variable: local
21. Who is calling? caller
22. Logging with Log::Dispatch
23. Time and date with DateTime
24. Filtering with grep in Perl
25. Transforming a perl array using the map function
26. Signals and the kill function
27. 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