Learning Perl, 3rd Edition

Appendix B. Beyond the Llama

We’ve covered a lot in this book, but there’s even more. In this appendix, we’ll tell about a little more of what Perl can do, and give some references on where to learn the details. Some of what we mention here is on the bleeding edge and may have changed by the time that you’re reading this book, which is one reason why we frequently send you to the documentation for the full story. We don’t expect many readers to read every word of this appendix, but we hope you’ll at least skim the headings so that you’ll be prepared to fight back when someone tells you “You just can’t use Perl for project X, because Perl can’t do Y.”

Further Documentation

The documentation that comes with Perl may seem overwhelming at first. Fortunately, you can use your computer to search for keywords in the documentation. When searching for a particular topic, it’s often good to start with the perltoc (table of contents) and perlfaq (frequently asked questions) sections. On most systems, the perldoc command should be able to track down the documentation for Perl, installed modules, and related programs (including perldoc itself).

Regular expressions

Yes, there’s even more about regular expressions than we mentioned. Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl is one of the best technical books we’ve ever read.^[1] It’s half about regular expressions in general, and half about Perl’s regular expressions. It goes into good detail about how the regular expression engine works ...