Advanced Perl Programming

The Book’s Approach

You have not bought this book just to see a set of features. or that, free online documentation would suffice. I want to convey practical problem-solving techniques that use appropriate features, along with the foundations of the technology areas mentioned in the previous section.

A Note to the Expert

This book takes a tutorial approach to explaining bits and pieces of Perl syntax, making the need felt for a particular concept or facility before explaining how Perl fills the void. Experienced people who don’t need the justifications for any facilities or verbose examples will likely benefit by first taking a look at Appendix B, to quickly take in all the syntactic constructs and idioms described in this book and go to the appropriate explanations should the need arise.

It is my earnest hope that the chapters on technology, embedding, extending, and Perl interpreter internals (the non-syntax-related ones) will be useful to the casual user and expert alike.

Systems View

This book tends to take the systems view of things; most chapters have a section explaining what is really going on inside. I believe that you can never be a good programmer if you know only the syntax of the language but not how the compilation or run-time environment is implemented. For example, a C programmer must know that it is a bad idea for a function to return the address of a local variable (and the reason for this restriction), and a Java programmer should know why a thread may never get control ...