Intermediate Perl

Chapter 1. Welcome to the next step in your understanding of Perl. You're probably here either because you want to learn to write programs that are more than 100 lines long or because your boss has told you to do so. See, our Learning Pe...

Chapter 2. Intermediate Foundations Before we get started on the meat of the book, we want to introduce some intermediate-level Perl idioms that we use throughout the book. These are the things that typically set apart the beginning and i...

Chapter 3. Using Modules Modules are the building blocks for our programs. They provide reusable subroutines, variables, and even object-oriented classes. On our way to building our own modules , we'll show you some of those you might be...

Chapter 4. to References References are the basis for complex data structures, object-oriented programming (OOP), and fancy subroutine magic. They're the magic that was added between Perl version 4 and version 5 to make it all possible....

Chapter 5. References and Scoping We can copy and pass around references like any other scalar. At any given time, Perl knows the number of references to a particular data item. Perl can also create references to anonymous data structures...

Chapter 6. Manipulating Complex Data Structures Now that you've seen the basics of references, let's look at additional ways to manipulate complex data. We'll start by using the debugger to examine complex data structures and then use Dat...

Chapter 7. Subroutine References So far, you've seen references to three main Perl data types: scalars, arrays, and hashes. We can also take a reference to a subroutine (sometimes called a coderef). Why would we want to do that? Well, i...

Chapter 8. Filehandle References We've seen arrays, hashes, and subroutines passed around in references, permitting a level of indirection to solve certain types of problems. We can also store filehandles in references. Let's look at the...

Chapter 9. Practical Reference Tricks This chapter looks at optimizing sorting and dealing with recursively defined data....

Chapter 10. Building Larger Programs This chapter looks at how to break up a program into pieces and includes some of the concerns that arise when we put those pieces back together again, or when many people work together on the same prog...

Chapter 11. to Objects Object-oriented programming (OOP) helps programmers run code sooner and maintain it easier by organizing the code into things that we can name. We need a little more infrastructure to get going with objects, but in...

Chapter 12. Objects with Data Using the simple syntax introduced in Chapter 11, we have class methods, (multiple) inheritance, overriding, and extending. We've been able to factor out common code and provide a way to reuse implementations...

Chapter 13. Object Destruction In the previous two chapters, we looked at basic object creation and manipulation. In this chapter, we'll look at an equally important topic: what happens when objects go away. As we showed in Chapter 4, whe...

Chapter 14. Some Advanced Object Topics You might wonder, "Do all objects inherit from a common class?" "What if a method is missing?" "What about multiple inheritance?" or "How can I tell what sort of object I have?" Well, wonder no more...

Chapter 15. Exporter In Chapter 3, we showed you how to use modules, some of which pulled functions into the current namespace. Now we're going to show you how to get your own modules to do that. The CHM file was converted...

Chapter 16. Writing a Distribution In Chapter 15, we created a fictional Island::Plotting::Maps module and built the right support for Exporter so that we could include use Island::Plotting::Maps in a program. While the resulting .pm file...

Chapter 17. Essential Testing As we briefly described in Chapter 16, a distribution contains a testing facility that we can invoke from make test. This allows us to write and run tests during development and maintenance, and it also lets...

Chapter 18. Advanced Testing The Test::More module provides some simple and general functions, but other Test::* modules provide more specific tests for particular problem domains so that we don't have to write much code to do what we nee...

Chapter 19. Contributing to CPAN Besides allowing others in your organization to receive the benefits of these wonderful modules and distributions you've created, you can contribute to the Perl community at large. The mechanism for sharin...