Mastering Perl

The Ultimate Resource for Creating Professional Programs with Perl

This is the third in O’Reilly’s series of landmark Perl tutorials,
which includes Learning Perl the bestselling introduction to the basics of Perl syntax, and Intermediate Perl
the indispensable guide to creating re-usable Perl software. By conveying Perl’s special models and programming idioms, Mastering Perl pulls it all together to help you bend Perl to your will.

This book isn’t a collection of clever tricks, but a way of thinking about Perl
programming so you can solve real-life problems of debugging, maintenance, and
configuration that you encounter as a working programmer.

The book explains how to:

Use advanced regular expressions, including global matches, lookarounds,
readable regexes, and regex debugging
. Avoid common programming problems with secure programming techniques
. Profile and benchmark Perl so that you know where to focus your improvements
. Wrangle Perl code to make it more presentable and readable
See how Perl keeps track of package variables and how you can use that for some
powerful tricks
Define subroutines on the fly and turn the tables on normal procedural
programming
. Modify and jury-rig modules to fix code without editing the original source
. Let your users configure your programs without touching the code
. Detect errors Perl doesn’t report and how to tell users about them
. Get your Perl program talk back to you with Log4perl
Store data for later use in another program or a later run of the same program, and how to send data over a network
Write programs as modules to get the benefit of Perl’s distribution and testing tools