Programming Perl, 4th Edition

03/10/2012 · No Responses

Adopted as the undisputed Perl bible soon after the first edition appeared in 1991, Programming Perl is still the go-to guide for this highly practical language. Perl began life as a super-fueled text processing utility, but quickly evolved into a general purpose programming language that’s helped hundreds of thousands of programmers, system administrators, and enthusiasts, like you, get your job done.

In this much-anticipated update to “the Camel,” three renowned Perl authors cover the language up to its current version, Perl 5.14, with a preview of features in the upcoming 5.16. In a world where Unicode is increasingly essential for text processing, Perl offers the best and least painful support of any major language, smoothly integrating Unicode everywhere—including in Perl’s most popular feature: regular expressions.

Important features covered by this update include:

New keywords and syntax
I/O layers and encodings
New backslash escapes
Unicode 6.0
Unicode grapheme clusters and properties
Named captures in regexes
Recursive and grammatical patterns
Expanded coverage of CPAN
Current best practices

Table of Contents
Part I: Overview
Chapter 1. An Overview of Perl

Part II: The Gory Details
Chapter 2. Bits and Pieces
Chapter 3. Unary and Binary Operators
Chapter 4. Statements and Declarations
Chapter 5. Pattern Matching
Chapter 6. Unicode
Chapter 7. Subroutines
Chapter 8. References
Chapter 9. Data Structures
Chapter 10. Packages
Chapter 11. Modules
Chapter 12. Objects
Chapter 13. Overloading
Chapter 14. Tied Variables

Part III: Perl as Technology
Chapter 15. Interprocess Communication
Chapter 16. Compiling
Chapter 17. The Command-Line Interface
Chapter 18. The Perl Debugger
Chapter 19. CPAN

Part IV: Perl as Culture
Chapter 20. Security
Chapter 21. Common Practices
Chapter 22. Portable Perl
Chapter 23. Plain Old Documentation
Chapter 24. Perl Culture

Part V: Reference Material
Chapter 25. Special Names
Chapter 26. Formats
Chapter 27. Functions
Chapter 28. The Standard Perl Library
Chapter 29. Pragmatic Modules

Part VI: Index of Perl Modules in This Book