September 2003
Intermediate to advanced
396 pages
10h 15m
English
Content preview from Mastering Perl for BioinformaticsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 3. Object-Oriented Programming in Perl
In Chapter 1, you saw how modules are defined and used, and in Chapter 2, how references and data structures work. Now, it’s time to introduce the important concepts and techniques of object-oriented programming in Perl that are based on modules and references.
Object-oriented (OO) programming is one of the most important approaches to writing programs, and it is an approach that has been well supported by Perl for quite a while. Other OO languages of interest include Java, C++, and Smalltalk. Many Perl modules are written in an OO style, and their proper use requires some fundamental understanding of the OO approach. Luckily, the key concepts are fairly simple.
Perl easily supports both declarative and OO programming. (Perl was originally a declarative language only; the OO style was added fairly early on.) Declarative programming is characterized by code that declares variables and subroutines, conditional tests, if-else branches, and loops, and various arithmetic, logical, and string operators. It is up to you to manage the definition and use of the variables and subroutines so that they interact in appropriate ways. (You’ll see shortly how object-oriented programming imposes additional constraints that help you create well-behaved programs.) Many declarative programming languages are well established, including Perl and such stalwarts as C, FORTRAN, and BASIC, to name just a few. By this point, assuming you have some experience ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.