August 1997
Intermediate to advanced
432 pages
12h 19m
English
Content preview from Advanced Perl ProgrammingBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Why Perl?
So why Perl, then, and not Visual Basic, Tcl, or Python?
Although Visual Basic is an excellent choice on a Wintel[3] PC, it’s not around on any other platform, so it has not been a practical choice for me.
Tcl forces me to go to C much earlier than I want, primarily because of data and code-structuring reasons. Tcl’s performance has never been the critical factor for me because I have always implicitly accounted for the fact and apportioned only the non-performance-critical code to it. I recommend Brian Kernighan’s paper “Experience with Tcl/Tk for Scientific and Engineering Visualization,” for his comments on Tcl and Visual Basic. It is available at http://inferno.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk.
Most Tcl users are basically hooked on the Tk user interface toolkit; count me among them. Tk also works with Perl, so I get the best part of that environment to work with a language of my choice.
I am an unabashed admirer of Python, a scripting language developed by Guido van Rossum (please see http://www.python.org/). It has a clean syntax and a nice object-oriented model, is thread-safe, has tons of libraries, and interfaces extremely well with C. I prefer Perl (to Python) more for practical than for engineering reasons. On the engineering side, Perl is fast and is unbeatable when it comes to text support. It is also highly idiomatic, which means that Perl code tends to be far more compact than any other language. The last one is not necessarily a good thing, depending on your ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.