Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Conventions Used in This Book

Some of our conventions get larger sections of their very own. Coding conventions are discussed in the section on “Programming with Style” in Chapter 21. In a sense, our lexical conventions are given in the Glossary.

The following typographic conventions are used in this book:

small capitals

Is used mostly for the formal names of Unicode characters, and for talking about Boolean operators.

Italic

Is used for URLs, manpages, pathnames, and programs. New terms are also italicized when they first appear in the text. Many of these terms will have alternate definitions in the Glossary, if the one in the text doesn’t do it for you. It is also used for command names and command-line switches. This allows one to distinguish, for example, between the –w warnings switch and the –w filetest operator.

Monospace Regular

Is used in examples to show the text that you enter literally, and in regular text to show any literal code. Data values are represented by monospace in roman quotes, which are not part of the value.

Monospace Oblique

Is used for generic code terms for which you must substitute particular values. It’s sometimes also used in examples to show output produced by a program.

Monospace Bold

Is occasionally used for literal text that you would type into your command-line shell.

Monospace Bold Oblique

Is used for literal output when needed to distinguish it from shell input.

We give lots of examples, most of which are pieces of code that should go into a larger ...