Beginning Perl (free)

Perl.org free online Perl books: Beginning Perl

by Simon Cozens

Introduction 

Chapter 1: First Steps In Perl 

Chapter 2: Working with Simple Values 

Chapter 3: Lists and Hashes 

Chapter 4: Loops and Decisions 

Chapter 5: Regular Expressions 

Chapter 6: Files and Data 

Chapter 7: References 

Chapter 8: Subroutines 

Chapter 9: Running and Debugging Perl 

Chapter 10: Modules 

Chapter 11: Object-Oriented Perl 

Chapter 12: Introduction to CGI 

Chapter 13: Perl and Databases 

Chapter 14: The World of Perl 

Appendix A: Regular Expressions 

Appendix B: Special Variables 

Appendix C: Function Reference 

Appendix D: The Perl Standard Modules 

Appendix E: Command Line Reference 

Appendix F: The ASCII Character Set 

Appendix G: Licenses 

Appendix H: Solutions to Exercises 

Appendix J: Support, Errata and P2P.Wrox.Com 

Index 

Code Examples (Zip Format) 

Code Examples (tar.gz Format) 


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What does this book cover?

Book overview

Perl is a well-established programming language that has been developed through the time and effort of countless free software programmers into an immensely powerful tool that can be used on pratically every operating system in the world. Perl started out as the "Swiss army knife" of computer languages and was used primarily by system administrators, but over time it's grown into an immensely robust language used by web-developers and programmers worldwide. It's also a great way to learn programming techniques and develop your own style of coding.

"There's more than one way to do it" is the motto of Perl, but this book aims to take you through them all. We'll take you from installation, through the core language elements - regular expressions, references, modules and the like - and onto basic applied techniques. You'll see how to access and work with databases in Perl, write CGI scripts to generate web pages and beyond. Coverage is bang up to date, using Perl 5.6 in all our examples and there's a handy reference section in the back.

Who is this book for?

This book is for those new to programming who want to learn with Perl. You will find it easier if you already have some basic programming experience, but the material covered can be mastered by anyone with just a text editor, some common sense and a computer. If you want to learn how to program with Perl and then find out how far you can go with it, this is the book for you. An excellent companion on any programming course.