Learning Perl, 5th 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 you a little more about what Perl can do and give you 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 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.”

The most important thing to keep in mind (so that we’re not repeating it in every paragraph) is that the most important part of what we’re not covering here is covered in Intermediate Perl (O’Reilly), also know as “the Alpaca.” You should definitely read the Alpaca, especially if you’ll be writing programs that are longer than 100 lines (either alone, or with other people), and especially if you’re tired of hearing about Fred and Barney, and want to move on to another fictional universe, featuring seven people^[32] who got to spend a lot of time on an isolated island after a cruise!

After the Alpaca, you’ll be ready to move on to Mastering Perl (O’Reilly), also know as “the Vicuñas.” It covers the everyday tasks that you’ll want to do while programming Perl, such as benchmarking and profiling, program configuration, and logging. It also ...