Perl is one of the most important scripting languages in use today. Open source, freely available, portable, versatile, and robust, powerful and easy to use, Perl is the first choice for thousands of professional web developers. But Perl is far more than a scripting language for the web. Supported by a comprehensive standard library and hundreds of third-party libraries, Perl is an increasingly popular choice for application programming.

This book provides comprehensive coverage of the Perl language. It covers the fundamentals of data types and file handling through advanced features like regular expressions, object-oriented programming, threads, internationalization, and integrating Perl with the C programming language. The latest version of the language, Perl 5.6, is used throughout, with commentary for those with earlier versions.

Amazon.com Review Perl is one of the most important and powerful languages available today, and Professional Perl Programming offers an in-depth guide to exploiting some of its best features. With a densely packed tutorial straight from the experts, it is suitable for any experienced developer who wants to get more from this language.

Weighing in at over 1,200 pages, the text is dedicated to the principle that more is more, yet in covering the breadth of today's Perl, it doesn't ever lose sight of the practical details. One of the best feautures is its attention to running Perl in multiple environments. Early sections look at installing and running Perl on Unix, Windows, and the Mac. There is plenty of advice on how to run and deploy scripts, including excellent sections on the internals of Perl, autoloading modules, and creating installable modules for distribution.

A practical, hands-on focus is the rule throughout this text, which features short code excerpts rather than full-length scripts. Early sections cover pretty much the entire Perl language in significant detail, from data types (including scalars, arrays, and hashes, which help give Perl its distinctive personality) to flow control statements and their scoping rules. An important chapter presents object-oriented Perl, including common class design constructs like inheritance.

The emphasis of much of this book is on detailing the use of key Perl modules to perform basic and important tasks like file I/O, working with files and directories, process control, and networking. One notable section covers regular expressions with a clearly presented (yet sophisticated) tutorial to this essential Perl feature. (Besides the fundamentals, the book examines optimizing your regular expressions for better performance.) Later sections show you how to do networking in Perl, as well as how to get Perl to interoperate with C and even Java. The book closes with a concise listing of available Perl functions, as well as the most important Perl modules.

Professional Perl Programming doesn't dumb the subject down. Perl is infinitely rich and sometimes difficult, and this book is up to the task. It succeeds at presenting a wide-ranging tour of today's Perl with enough information to please even experienced Perl programmers. It contains much to mine in the way of basic and expert material that any intermediate to advanced developer can use to do more with Perl in everyday programming projects. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

• Introduction to Perl distributions and modules
• Running Perl on Unix, Windows, and other platforms
• Intensive programming tutorial for Perl
• Numbers and strings
• Perl operators in detail
• Using scalars, lists, arrays, and hashes
• Complex data structures and typeglobs
• Expressions
• Statements and blocks
• Flow control and loops
• Subroutines
• Scope and visibility rules in Perl
• Including and using Perl modules
• Autoloading modules
• Creating installable modules
• In-depth tutorial for regular expressions (including performance tips)
• Perl file I/O and file handles (including working with files and directories)
• Command-line handling and shells
• Terminal I/O
• Warnings and errors in Perl
• Using the Perl debugger
• Automated testing and profiling
• Text processing and reporting in Perl
• Object-oriented Perl (including basic object-oriented class design features like inheritance)
• Perl internals
• Integrating Perl with C, Java, and COM
• Creating and managing processes in Perl (including signals, IPC, and threads)
• Perl networking (from sockets to higher-level Internet protocols)
• Techniques for writing portable Perl code
• Unicode support
• Locale and internationalization techniques in Perl
• Function reference for Perl 5.6
• Listing of standard Perl modules