brian d foy - Learning Perl Student Workbook

This workbook is an additional set of exercises to supplement those already in Learning Perl, Sixth Edition . The chapter and page references apply only to that edition. Additionally, unless I denote otherwise, Learning Perl without qualification means the sixth edition. That book already contains some exercises, and I try to cover the topics those exercises didnt.

Ive been teaching Perl since 1998, and my beginner classes use Learning Perl as the course text. Along the way, Ive posed a lot of additional problems to students so they could test their understanding of the topics I covered and some of the additional information I added in the lecture. In doing this, I pose two sorts of problems: one of simple knowledge where knowing the right fact or trick makes the problem easy, and the other somewhat clever where a Perl implementation of a particular technique solves the problem. Ive tried to include both of those sorts of problems in this book.

You should find some exercises are easy, some require that you find nuggets of information you may have missed on a first reading of Learning Perl , and others require you know something about algorithms or programming that arent simply a question of Perl knowledge and might require you to do some research on your own. As you learn about how to learn about Perl, whether through its documentation or online resources, I pose these challenging problems expecting that youll use everything available to you. Theres a lot more to programming than just the syntax.

This isnt a classroom and you arent being graded, unless it is a classroom and you are being graded. I wont think you are cheating if you use Google, and you shouldnt feel that you have to come up with everything just by staring at a blank document. If someone is grading you, just show them this paragraph and tell them I say its okay. If youre the instructor, fear not: no one reads the preface anyway, especially if its not on the test.

You should be able to complete most of the exercises with Perl 5.8, and I expect that you might even be able to use Perl 5.004, a quite ancient version indeed. Some of the exercises require a minimum version of Perl because I want you to use a particular feature introduced in that version, and Ill note the minimum version in the exercise when its appropriate. If you dont note a minimum version assume that its at least Perl 5.8. Id prefer that you use a supported version of Perl, which at this writing is at least Perl 5.14. However, I know that some of you dont get to make that choice.

Perls motto, for good or bad, is Theres More Than One Way To Do It, so dont take my solutions as gospel. Remember that the corollary to that is But most of them are wrong, so dont go out of your way to avoid techniques that I show. I show you a way to do it, and often I give you more than one way to do it. However, if you accomplished the task and your solution doesnt look remotely similar to mine, thats okay (probably).

Some of my answers have extra material that show techniques youll read about in later chapters. I dont expect you to use those techniques, but I show them because they are the techniques and features youll use in everyday programming once you finish the book. They are just a taste of things to come.