9780130282514

The grand-daddy of all Perl guides-now updated for Perl on all key platforms. bull; bull;All new EDITION of the classic hands-on guide to Perl bull;Extensive new coverage of CGI for Web development bull;Now with full cross-platform coverage, including Linux, UNIX, Windows NT, and Macintosh bull;Packed with examples, all on the enclosed CD-ROM, along with up-to-date Perl software for Windows users bull;Best-selling AUTHOR Ellie Quigley is Silicon Valley's leading Perl instructor! The Perl tutorial and reference that started it all is now available in a thoroughly revised EDITION that covers all flavors of Perl and all system and Web applications. Best-selling AUTHOR Ellie Quigley combines her deep background and UNIX chops with up-to-the-minute experience teaching Perl and shell programming on all platforms. This translates into hands-on examples that all users can put straight to work whether scripting Web applications or managing networks. Filled with practical information on Perl development, Perl by Example, Third EDITION covers names and operators, regular expressions, file handles, libraries, references, reporting, and more. Highlights include: bull; bull;Support for Perl on Unix, Linux, Windows, and Macintosh bull;CGI Web development with CGI.pm bull;Database integration with Perl DBI The user-friENDly style offers one-to-one comparisons with other popular languages and utilities and a massive reference section for easy look-up. The hands-on tutorials are great for beginners, but also offer handy refreshers for experienced programmers looking to update their skills. About the CD-ROMThe CD-ROM includes all source code from the book, plus new Perl distributions for Windows.

Preface	p. xxvii
The Practical Extraction and Report Language	p. 1
What Is Perl?	p. 1
What Is an Interpreted Language?	p. 2
Who Uses Perl?	p. 3
Where to Get Perl	p. 5
What Is CPAN?	p. 9
Perl Documentation	p. 10
What You Should Know	p. 12
What s Next?	p. 12
Perl Quick Start	p. 13
Quick Start, Quick Reference	p. 13
Chapter Summary	p. 29
What s Next?	p. 29
Perl Scripts	p. 31
Script Setup	p. 31
The Script	p. 32
Perl at the Command Line	p. 39
What You Should Know	p. 43
What s Next?	p. 43
Getting a Handle on Printing	p. 45
The Filehandle	p. 45
Words	p. 45
The print Function	p. 46
The printf Function	p. 59
What You Should Know	p. 66
What s Next?	p. 66
What s in a Name	p. 69
About Perl Variables	p. 69
Scalars, Arrays, and Hashes	p. 77
Reading from STDIN	p. 94
Array Functions	p. 100
Hash (Associative Array) Functions	p. 118
More Hashes	p. 128
What You Should Know	p. 132
What s Next?	p. 133
Where s the Operator?	p. 137
About Perl Operators	p. 137
Mixing Data Types	p. 138
Precedence and Associativity	p. 139
What You Should Know	p. 168
What s Next?	p. 168
If Only, Unconditionally, Forever	p. 171
Control Structures, Blocks, and Compound Statements	p. 171
Repetition with Loops	p. 177
What You Should Know	p. 200
What s Next?	p. 200
Regular ExpressionsPattern Matching	p. 203
What Is a Regular Expression?	p. 203
Expression Modifiers and Simple Statements	p. 204
Regular Expression Operators	p. 210
What You Should Know	p. 232
What s Next?	p. 232
Getting ControlRegular Expression Metacharacters	p. 235
Regular Expression Metacharacters	p. 235
Unicode	p. 281
What You Should Know	p. 283
What s Next?	p. 283
Getting a Handle on Files	p. 285
The User-Defined Filehandle	p. 285
Passing Arguments	p. 310
File Testing	p. 319
What You Should Know	p. 321
What s Next?	p. 322
How Do Subroutines Function?	p. 325
Subroutines/Functions	p. 325
Passing Arguments	p. 330
Call-by-Reference	p. 344
What You Should Know	p. 358
What s Next?	p. 359
Modularize It, Package It, and Send It to the Library!	p. 363
Packages and Modules	p. 363
The Standard Perl Library	p. 370
Modules from CPAN	p. 390
What You Should Know	p. 398
What s Next?	p. 398
Does This Job Require a Reference?	p. 401
What Is a Reference? What Is a Pointer?	p. 401
What You Should Know	p. 420
What s Next?	p. 420
Bless Those Things! (Object-Oriented Perl)	p. 423
The OOP Paradigm	p. 423
Classes, Objects, and Methods	p. 425
Anonymous Subroutines, Closures, and Privacy	p. 453
Inheritance	p. 460
Public User InterfaceDocumenting Classes	p. 474
Using Objects from the Perl Library	p. 479
What You Should Know	p. 484
What s Next?	p. 485
Those Magic Ties and DBM Stuff	p. 493
Tying Variables to a Class	p. 493
DBM Files	p. 505
What You Should Know	p. 512
What s Next?	p. 512
CGI and Perl: The Hyper Dynamic Duo	p. 513
Static and Dynamic Web Pages 513
How It all Works	p. 516
Creating a Web Page with HTML	p. 522
How HTML and CGI Work Together	p. 526
Getting Information Into and Out of the CGI Script	p. 531
CGI and Forms	p. 535
The
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Preface Last week, I was teachingPerlat the UCSC extension in Santa Clara, California to a group of professionals coming from all around the Bay Area. I always ask at the beginning of the class, "and so why do you want to learn Perl?". The responses vary from, "Our company has an auction site on the Web and I'm the webmaster. I need to maintain the CGI programs that process our orders, " or "I work in a genetics research group at Stanford and have to deal with tons of data . . . we're looking for the gene that causes arteriosclerosis . . . oh and I heard that if I learn Perl, I won't have to depend on programmers to do this," or "I work at a local bank and we use Perl to interface with our big Oracle databases," or "I'm a UNIX/NT system administrator and our boss has decided that all future admin scripts should be written in Perl," or "I'm designing a Web page for my wife who wants to do Taro card readings for profit," or "I just got laid off and heard that it's an absolute must to have Perl on my resume." And I am always amazed at the variety of people who show up: engineers, scientists, geneticists, meteorologists, managers, salespeople, programmers, techies, hardware guys, students, stockbrokers, administrators of all kinds, librarians, authors, bankers, artists-you name it. Perl does not exclude anyone. Perl is for everyone and it runs on everything. No matter who you are, I think you'll agree, a picture is worth a thousand words, and so is a good example.Perl by Exampleis organized to teach you Perl from scratch with examples of complete succinct programs. Each line of a script example is numbered, and important lines are highlighted in bold. The output of the program is then displayed with line numbers corresponding to the script line numbers. Following the output is a separate explanation for each of the numbered lines. The examples are small and to the point for the topic at hand. Since the backbone of this book was used as a student guide to a Perl course, the topics are modularized. Each chapter builds on the previous one with a minimum of forward referencing and a logical progression from one topic to the next. There are exercises at the end of the chapters. You will find all of the examples on the CD at the back of the book. They have been thoroughly tested on a number of major platforms. Perl by Exampleis not just a beginner's guide, but a complete guide to Perl. It covers many aspects of what Perl can do, from regular expression handling, to formatting reports, to interprocess communication. It will teach you about Perl and, in the process, a lot about UNIX and Windows. Since Perl was originally written on and for UNIX systems, some UNIX knowledge will greatly accelerate your learning path, but it is not assumed that you are by any means a guru. Anyone reading, writing, or just maintaining Perl programs can greatly profit from this text. Topics such as networking, system calls, IPC, and CGI are designed to save the time it takes to figure out how the functions work, what libraries are needed, the correct syntax, etc. This third edition also covers Perl objects, references, and CGI, as well as a new chapter to show you how to use the popularCGI.pmmodule by Lincoln Stein. Perl has a rich variety of functions for handling strings, arrays, the system interface, networking, and more. In order to understand how these functions work, background information concerning the hows, whys, and what fors is provided before demonstrating functional sample programs. This eliminates constantly wading through manual pages and other books to understand what is going on, what the arguments mean, and what the function actually does. The appendices contain a complete list of functions and definitions, command line switches, special variables, popular modules, the Perl debugger; a fully functional, object-oriented CGI program; some other helpful scripts; and a helpful

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Perl by Example

Perl by Example

0130282510

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