February 2012
Intermediate to advanced
1184 pages
37h 17m
English
Content preview from Programming Perl, 4th EditionBecome 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.
The Standard Distribution
The official Perl policy, as noted in perlpolicy, is that the last two maintenance releases are officially supported. Since the current release as we write this is v5.14, that means both v5.12 and v5.14 are officially supported. When v5.16 is released, v5.12 won’t be supported anymore.
Most operating system vendors these days include Perl as a standard component of their systems, although their release cycles might not track the latest Perl. As of this writing, AIX, BeOS, BSDI, Debian, DG/UX, DYNIX/ptx, FreeBSD, IRIX, LynxOS, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, OS390, RedHat, SINIX, Slackware, Solaris, SuSE, and Tru64 all came with Perl as part of their standard distributions. Some companies provide Perl on separate CDs of contributed freeware or through their customer service groups. Third-party companies like ActiveState offer prebuilt Perl distributions for a variety of different operating systems, including those from Microsoft.
Even if your vendor does ship Perl as standard, you’ll probably eventually want to compile and install Perl on your own. That way you’ll know you have the latest version, and you’ll be able to choose where to install your libraries and documentation. You’ll also be able to choose whether to compile Perl with support for optional extensions such as multithreading, large files, or the many low-level debugging options available through the –D command-line switch. (The user-level Perl debugger is always supported.)
The easiest way to download a Perl ...
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.