Intermediate Perl 5 Programming

Students should be familiar with Perl to the level of a foundation course.

Ideally that would be obtained by attending the course; if self-taught then the delegate should have experience at least to the level of the O'Reilly book 'Learning Perl'.

It is assumed that delegates have recent experience in writing Perl programs, and are familiar with the Perl variable types, basic file IO, simple regular expressions, and the concepts of subroutines and modules.

Delegates will learn how to

•Use all significant features of the Perl 5 programming language
•Understand differences between Perl 5 releases
•Develop Perl programmes containing advanced Perl constructs
•Implement advanced data stream handling
•Implement subroutines and modules
•Act on Perl run-time warnings and errors, using exception handling
•Use and implement advanced features of subroutines and modules, including OO
•Perform pattern matching using advanced Regular Expressions
•Use DBI interface and DBD modules to connect to a database
•Write programs to facilitate network communication

Having gained basic knowledge of Perl, this course will take you to the next level. To understand what Perl contexts really mean, rather than just accepting them, and to write most expressive code. The power of Perl file handling is extended, together with a look at low-level file IO interfaces.

With references we can take our Perl beyond mere scripts and use more complex and efficient data structures – not to mention take advantage of Object Orientation techniques.

Writing well structured applications with our own modules and subroutines requires a through understanding of how parameters are passed, how namespaces work, and how to handle errors if and when they occur.

Finally we give an overview of network and database programming with Perl – areas few programmers can avoid for long.

Every effort is made to maintain the course material at the very latest release of Perl, and new features will be discussed.