November 2001
Beginner
320 pages
5h 53m
English
Perl has one of the largest sets of built-in functions of any language. Although this means that you can do a lot internally with Perl without ever requiring an external module. Because the modules provide the functionality it makes changing these internal interfaces or disabling them according to the current platform significantly easier. Many of the functions are Unix-specific and in recent years moves have been made to support the built-in operations with an alternative class-based module from the standard Perl library. For example, many people now use IO::Socket over the built-in network socket handling functions, and IO::Handle provides a much better interface for communicating with external data sources, including files ...