Programming in PERL-Advanced Topics

Course Number:  675-TP
Recommended Duration:  2 days

Intended Audience
Experienced PERL Developers who need to increase their PERL skills.

Objectives
This course teaches advanced concepts and capabilities that can be used to write procedures in PERL (V5), especially the new interfaces that use object-oriented features.  Each student will be able to use PERL techniques and commands to write scripts to perform various user and administrative tasks, implementing advanced features of the language.  There are several hands-on machine exercises.  All five UNIX platforms will be available for lab exercises.

Prerequisites

Completion of the "Programming in PERL: Basic/Intermediate" or equivalent experience is assumed.

Topics

• Using PERL references

• Purpose of references

• Querying a reference

• Symbolic references

• References to functions: named functions, anonymous functions, callbacks

• Multi-dimensional arrays

• Complex data structures

• Using PERL Typeglobs

• PERL variables, symbol tables, and scope

• Typeglobs compared with references

• PERL modules and packages

• Basic packages

• Packages and component files

• Initialization and destruction

• Accessing the symbol table

• Preparing a package for distribution with h2xs

• Object Oriented PERL Programming

• Objects in PERL

• Inheritance

• Argument passing

• Methods of persistence

• FreezeThaw.pm / Storable.pm / MLDBM.pm

• DBI (Database Interface)

• PERL Scripts for

• Networking with Sockets

• Server-side functions and setup

• Client-side functions and setup

• Installing PERL modules from the CPAN

• Adding documentation to a module/program