Advanced Perl Programming (2nd Edition) Duration: 3 days Audience Course Contents Instructional Technique Prerequisites Operating System Differences

Advanced Perl Programming (2nd Edition)

Duration: 3 days

Audience

Software engineers, programmers, web site administrators, and system administrators who will be designing and creating programs using Perl. This course is a follow-on to our five day Introduction to Perl course and it presumes the student has extensive working knowledge of the content of that course.

This course is taught using the O'Reilly and Associates Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition book, with hands-on labs and case studies added. (Note that the 1st edition of that book is quite different from the 2nd edition.)

Course Contents

1. Advanced Techniques
   • Introspection
   • Messing with the Class Model
   • Unexpected Code
2. Parsing Techniques
   • Parse::RecDescent Grammars
   • Parse::Yapp
   • Other Parsing Techniques
3. Templating Tools
   • Formats and Text::Autoformat
   • Text::Template
   • HTML::Template
   • HTML::Mason
   • Template Toolkit
   • AxKit
4. Objects, Databases, and Applications
   • Beyond Flat Files
   • Object Serialization
   • Object Databases
   • Database Abstraction
   • Practical Uses in Web Applications
5. Natural Language Tools
   • Perl and Natural Languages
   • Handling English Text
   • Modules for Parsing English
   • Categorization and Extraction
6. Perl and Unicode
   • Terminology
   • What Is Unicode?
   • Unicode Transformation Formats
   • Handling UTF-8 Data
   • Encode
   • Unicode for XS Authors
7. POE
   • Programming in an Event-Driven Environment
   • Top-Level Pieces: Components
8. Testing
   • Test::Simple
   • Test::More
   • Test::Harness
   • Test::Builder
   • Test::Builder::Tester
   • Keeping Tests and Code Together
   • Unit Tests
9. Inline Extensions
   • Simple Inline::C
   • More Complex Tasks with Inline::C
   • Inline:: Everything Else

Instructional Technique

Students are invited to bring their current ideas and questions to the classroom for discussion. Lecture, group problem solving, and online laboratories will be used. Students will be encouraged to enhance their skills utilizing the techniques presented through classroom problem solving and controlled online workshops. This course is approximately 50% labwork.

Prerequisites

None, although experience in any interpreted scripting language would be particularly helpful (Visual Basic, Unix shell, TCL/Tk, Python, JavaScript, etc).

Operating System Differences

Unix

Perl was designed to be run on a Unix platform and this is its native environment. All materials in this course are written with this in mind.

Windows

Because Windows does not support the full operating environment expected by Perl, some features or functions are incomplete or not supported. This course discusses which aspects of Perl are affected. In most cases, alternative techniques are described which provide similar functionality. If this course will be taught in a Windows environment, please specify at the time of ordering so that an additional reference appendix may be attached to the course materials.

Lab Setup

For setup information, follow this link to a page which describes where to download a Perl distribution and what the setup requirements are.