Perl is a programming language of growing significance in the world of software development. A Little Book on Perl meets that growing academic market need for Perl books. This book attempts to target experienced programmers, whether that experience has come from professional programming or from the first two courses in a degree program in computer science. Neither a comprehensive reference book nor a tutorial, this book lands somewhere in the middle of these two models. The reader's advantage is a new model-no need to have prior knowledge of awk or C, or even anything about UNIX-since the contents of the book do not depend on any particular computer platform.
- Provides some overview of the purposes and origins of Perl.
- Independent of UNIX or Windows.
- An example program in Chapter 1 provides the reader with a quick introduction to the power of Perl and the compactness of Perl programs.
- This book includes many code segments, concentrating on Perl as a programming tool.
- Covers enough constructs to allow reader to write significant programs.
- Includes Perl's arrays, which are more flexible and powerful than those of other popular programming languages.
- Describes hashes-data structures for storing keyed table information.
- Describes references, which allow users to define their own data structures.
- Supports the information required to write CGI programs in Perl, including use of the CGI.pm module.
- Concludes with six advanced topics of Perl and how other programs can be launched from Perl programs.
- Provides a Companion Website with supplemental material to accompany the text.