Advanced Perl Programming Course

Perl is a mature, extremely flexible, general-purpose language, which is especially well suited to textual manipulation and file processing. In addition to its brilliant built-in facilities, there are vast freely-accessible libraries of Perl code to help build almost every conceivable application. And it’s available free-of-charge.

This nominally two-day course builds on Perl Introduction/Intermediate. It consolidates the constructs included in that course, explores more advanced use of arrays, hashes, and regular expressions, examines references and modules in detail, and extends these to the study of Perl’s approach to object-oriented programming, and the somewhat related topics of ties and closures.

A large part of the course deals with Perl’s approach to handling complex data structures, including implementing object-oriented programming in Perl.

The course extends consideration of the use of references and modules well beyond that provided in the course Perl Introduction/Intermediate, as well as exploring typeglobs. These techniques are then used to underpin detailed examination of object-oriented programming in Perl, including the tie function and closures. The last part of the course covers advanced and miscellaneous functions, constructs and issues not covered in depth in Perl Introduction/Intermediate.

The ‘standard’ topics in this course can be covered in two days. For one organisation, the optional topics can be covered in detail: that would require one or more further days; alternatively some ‘standard’ topics can be excluded or covered in less depth.

This course focuses on advanced language aspects of Perl. For an in-depth exploration of a range of applications for which Perl is typically applied see also Perl Applications. For one organisation selected aspects of these courses can be combined with Perl Introduction/Intermediate to address a very wide and flexible range of requirements.