Intermediate Perl, 2nd Edition

Preface

Almost 20 years ago (nearly an eternity in Internet time), Randal Schwartz wrote the first edition of Learning Perl. In the intervening years, Perl itself has grown substantially from a “cool” scripting language used primarily by Unix system administrators to a robust object-oriented programming language that runs on practically every computing platform known to mankind, and maybe some that aren’t.

Throughout its six editions, Learning Perl remained about the same size, around 300 pages, and continued to cover much of the same material to remain compact and accessible to the beginning programmer. But there is much more to learn about Perl.

Randal called the first edition of this book Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules, and we renamed its update Intermediate Perl, but we like to think of it as just Learning More Perl. This is the book that picks up where Learning Perl leaves off. We show how to use Perl to write larger programs.

As in Learning Perl, we designed each chapter to be small enough to read in just an hour or so. Each chapter ends with a series of exercises to help you practice what you’ve just learned, and the answers are provided in the appendix for your reference. And, like Learning Perl, we’ve developed the material in this book for use in a teaching environment.

Unless we note otherwise, everything in this book applies equally well to Perl on any platform, whether that is Unix, Linux, Windows ActivePerl from ActiveState, Strawberry Perl, or any other ...