Schwartz Randal Phoenix Tom foy brian - Intermediate Perl

Perl's object-oriented (OO) mechanism is classic prestidigitation. It takes a collection of Perl's existing non-OO features, such as packages, references, hashes, arrays, subroutines, and modules, and thenwith nothing up its sleevemanages to conjure up fully functional objects, classes, and methods, seemingly out of nowhere.

That's a great trick. It means you can build on your existing Perl knowledge and ease your way into OO Perl development, without first needing to conquer a mountain of new syntax or navigate an ocean of new techniques. It also means you can progressively fine-tune OO Perl to meet your own needs, by selecting from the existing constructs the one that best suits your task.

But there's a problem. Since Perl co-opts packages, references, hashes, arrays, subroutines, and modules as the basis for its OO mechanism, to use OO Perl you already need to understand packages, references, hashes, arrays, subroutines, and modules.

And there's the rub. The learning curve hasn't been eliminated; it's merely been pushed back half a dozen steps.

So then, how are you going to learn everything you need to know about non-OO Perl so you can start to learn everything you need to know about OO Perl?

This book is the answer. In the following pages, Randal draws on two decades of using Perl, and four decades of watching Gilligan's Island and Mr. Ed , to explain each of the components of Perl that collectively underpin its OO features. And, better still, he then goes on to show exactly how to combine those components to create useful classes and objects.

So if you still feel like Gilligan when it comes to Perl's objects, references, and modules, this book is just what the Professor ordered.

And that's straight from the horse's mouth.

Over a decade ago (nearly eternity in Internet Time), Randal Schwartz wrote the first edition of Learning Perl . In the intervening years, Perl itself has grown substantially from a "cool" scripting language used primarily by Unix system administrators to a robust object-oriented programming (OOP) language that runs on practically every computing platform known to mankind.

Throughout its four editions, Learning Perl remained the same size (about 300 pages) and continued to cover much of the same material to remain compact and accessible to the beginning programmer. But there is much more to learn about Perl now than when that first book was written.

Randal called the first edition of this book Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules , and now it's Intermediate Perl , but we like to think of it as just Learning More Perl .[] This is the book that picks up where Learning Perl leaves off. We show you how to use Perl to write larger programs.

As in Learning Perl , we designed each chapter to be small enough to read in just an hour or so. Each chapter ends with a series of exercises to help you practice what you've just learned, and the answers are in the appendix for your reference. And like Learning Perl , we've developed the material in this book for a teaching environment and used it in that setting, including for our own use at Stonehenge Consulting Services, as we conduct on-site and open-enrollment trainings.

You don't have to be a Unix guru, or even a Unix user, to benefit from this book. Unless otherwise noted, everything in this book applies equally well to Windows ActivePerl from ActiveState and all other modern implementations of Perl. To use this book, you just need to be familiar with the material in Learning Perl and have the ambition to go further.