RTD Training & Development

Introduction to Perl Programming

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Introduction to Perl Programming

Note: During the Covid-19 crisis, courses will only be delivered over the web

4 days hands-on £1,940+VAT

This course can be delivered over the web

Next scheduled date:
Monday November 25th, 2024 Enrol Now!

Core features of Perl, regular expressions, file and text processing, pipelining

Outline

The Perl Environment

  • Script format
  • Executing Perl scripts
  • Platform differences

Data

  • Scalars
  • Literals
  • Strings and numbers
  • Numerical operators
  • String operators
  • Arrays
  • Hashes

Control Structures

  • Conditionals
  • Statement modifiers
  • Subroutines
  • Argument passing

Regular Expressions

  • Simple regular expressions
  • Metacharacters
  • Character classes
  • Back-references
  • Built-in variables

Standard Functions

  • String functions
  • Array functions
  • Hash functions

Modules

  • Importing modules
  • Calling subroutines in other modules
  • Writing modules

I/O

  • Manipulating files and directories
  • Working with file handles
  • Using pipelines
  • Binary file handling

Reporting

  • Creating report formats
  • Built-in variables

Sorting

  • Basic sorting functions
  • Sorting on multiple fields

Complex Data Structures

  • References
  • Multi-dimensional arrays
  • Arrays of hashes
  • Hashes of hashes

Object-Oriented Modules

  • Obtaining third-party modules
  • Perl's object-oriented syntax
  • Using object-oriented modules
  • Simple CGI processing

Documentation

  • Using PerlDoc
  • Including pod documentation
  • Using pod translators

Overview

Perl is an interpreted programming language that is optimised for text processing. As such, it is well suited for generating reports based on data extracted from files.

Perl is available on all major operating systems including Unix, Linux, Windows, OS/2 and Mac/OS. The language interpreter is freely available, as is a vast amount of pre-written code.

Objectives

On successful completion of this course, participants will be able to:

  • Write and execute Perl programs
  • Write and use Perl subroutines
  • Locate and use Perl modules
  • Understand Perl's powerful regular expressions
  • Use Perl to manipulate files and directories
  • Navigate the extensive Perl documentation

Audience

This course is for system administrators who wish to process data and log files and require a language that enables powerful and flexible report-generation programs to be written quickly and easily.

This course is also an essential stepping stone for programmers and analysts who wish to use Perl for the CGI and object-oriented programming tasks covered in the Advanced Perl course.

Prerequisites

Participants are expected to be familiar with at least one other programming language. Those with C, C++, Java and/or Unix shell programming experience will recognise many syntactical similarities.

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