Mastering Algorithms with Perl

Preface

Perl’s popularity has soared in recent years. It owes its appeal first to its technical superiority: Perl’s unparalleled portability, speed, and expressiveness have made it the language of choice for a million programmers worldwide.

Those programmers have extended Perl in ways unimaginable with languages controlled by committees or companies. Of all languages, Perl has the largest base of free utilities, thanks to the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (abbreviated CPAN; see http://www.perl.com/CPAN/).The modules and scripts you’ll find there have made Perl the most popular language for web, text, and database programming.

But Perl can do more than that. You can solve complex problems in Perl more quickly, and in fewer lines, than in any other language.

This ease of use makes Perl an excellent tool for exploring algorithms. Computer science embraces complexity; the essence of programming is the clean dissection of a seemingly insurmountable problem into a series of simple, computable steps. Perl is ideal for tackling the tougher nuggets of computer science because its liberal syntax lets the programmer express his or her solution in the manner best suited to the task. (After all, Perl’s motto is There’s More Than One Way To Do It.) Algorithms are complex enough; we don’t need a computer language making it any tougher.

Most books about computer algorithms don’t include working programs. They express their ideas in quasi-English pseudocode instead, which allows the discussion ...