Intermediate Perl, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1. Introduction

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.

Our Learning Perl book was great because it introduced the use of Perl for short and medium programs (which is most of the programming done in Perl, we’ve observed). But, to keep “the Llama book” from being big and intimidating, we deliberately and carefully left a lot of information out.

In the pages that follow, you can get “the rest of the story” in the same style as our friendly Llama book. It covers what you need to write programs that are 100 to 10,000 (or even longer) lines long.

For example, you’ll learn how to work with multiple programmers on the same project by writing reusable Perl modules that you can wrap in distributions usable by the common Perl tools. This is great, because unless you work 35 hours each day, you’ll need some help with larger tasks. You’ll also need to ensure that your code all fits with the other code as you develop it for the final application.

This book will also show you how to deal with larger and more complex data structures, such as what we might casually call a “hash of hashes” or an “array of arrays of hashes of arrays.” Once you know a little about references, you’re on your way to arbitrarily complex data structures, which can make your life much easier.

Then there’s the buzzworthy notion of object-oriented programming, ...