Computer Science & Perl Programming

Preface

Jon Orwant

This is the first of three “Best of the Perl Journal” O’Reilly books, containing the crème de la crème of the 247 articles published during the Perl Journal’s five-year existence as a standalone magazine. This particular book covers computer science topics, advanced Perl programming techniques, and other subjects: together, the 70 articles in this book constitute a compendium of Perl lore. Little of what you’ll find here is covered in any other book.

This book is divided into eight sections:

Part I, Beginner Concepts

The book starts with articles about some of the corners of Perl that flummox beginners—and often experienced Perl programmers as well. You’ll find information here that many tutorials lack.

Part II, Regular Expressions

The articles in this section look under the hood of Perl’s regular expression engine, showing you how to create perfect patterns the first time you write them. If you don’t know why it’s important that Perl’s regex engine implements a nondeterministic finite automaton, you don’t know everything you should about Perl’s regular expressions.

Part III, Computer Science

In this section, Perl is used to demonstrate key computer science topics, ranging from practical implementations of complex data structures to information retrieval and pseudorandom number generation.

Part IV, Programming Techniques

Perl’s motto is There’s More Than One Way To Do It. This section shows you how to turn this flexibility to your advantage, demonstrating how to create ...