Preface xxv Chapter 1: The Practical Extraction and Report Language 1 1.1 What Is Perl? 1 1.2 What Is an Interpreted Language? 2 1.3 Who Uses Perl? 3 1.4 Where to Get Perl 6 1.5 Perl Documentation 9 1.6 What You Should Know 13 1.7 What''s Next? 13 Chapter 2: Perl Quick Start 15 2.

1 Quick Start, Quick Reference 15 2.2 Chapter Summary 32 2.3 What''s Next? 32 Chapter 3: Perl Scripts 33 3.1 Getting Started 33 3.2 Filehandles 37 3.3 Variables (Where to Put Data) 37 3.4 Summing It Up 42 3.5 Perl Switches 44 3.

6 What You Should Know 47 3.7 What''s Next? 47 Exercise 3 Getting with It Syntactically 48 Chapter 4: Getting a Handle on Printing 49 4.1 The Special Filehandles STDOUT , STDIN , STDERR 49 4.2 Words 51 4.3 The print Function 51 4.4 Fancy Formatting with the printf Function 69 4.5 What Are Pragmas? 74 4.6 What You Should Know 78 4.

7 What''s Next? 79 Exercise 4 A String of Perls 79 Chapter 5: What''s In a Name? 81 5.1 More About Data Types 81 5.2 Scalars, Arrays, and Hashes 87 5.3 Array Functions 105 5.4 Hash (Associative Array) Functions 125 5.5 What You Should Know 140 5.6 What''s Next? 141 Exercise 5 The Funny Characters 141 Chapter 6: Where''s the Operator? 145 6.1 About Perl Operators--More Context 145 6.

2 Mixing Types 148 6.3 Precedence and Associativity 149 6.4 What You Should Know 178 6.5 What''s Next? 179 Exercise 6 Operator, Operator 179 Chapter 7: If Only, Unconditionally, Forever 181 7.1 Control Structures, Blocks, and Compound Statements 182 7.2 Statement Modifiers and Simple Statements 188 7.3 Repetition with Loops 190 7.4 Looping Modifiers 202 7.

5 What You Should Know 217 7.6 What''s Next? 217 Exercise 7 What Are Your Conditions? 218 Chapter 8: Regular Expressions--Pattern Matching 219 8.1 What Is a Regular Expression? 219 8.2 Modifiers and Simple Statements with Regular Expressions 221 8.3 Regular Expression Operators 225 8.4 What You Should Know 243 8.5 What''s Next? 243 Exercise 8 A Match Made in Heaven 244 Chapter 9: Getting Control--Regular Expression Metacharacters 245 9.1 The RegExLib.

com Library 245 9.2 Regular Expression Metacharacters 247 9.3 Unicode 290 9.4 What You Should Know 294 9.5 What''s Next? 295 Exercise 9 And the Search Goes On . 295 Chapter 10: Getting a Handle on Files 297 10.1 The User-Defined Filehandle 297 10.2 Reading from STDIN 307 10.

3 Passing Arguments 333 10.4 File Testing 342 10.5 What You Should Know 344 10.6 What''s Next? 344 Exercise 10 Getting a Handle on Things 345 Chapter 11: How Do Subroutines Function? 347 11.1 Subroutines/Functions 348 11.2 Passing Arguments and the @_ Array 352 11.3 What You Should Know 373 11.4 What''s Next? 373 Exercise 11 I Can''t Seem to Function Without Subroutines 374 Chapter 12: Does This Job Require a Reference? 377 12.

1 What Is a Reference? 377 12.2 What You Should Know 404 12.3 What''s Next? 404 Exercise 12 It''s Not Polite to Point! 405 Chapter 13: Modularize It, Package It, and Send It to the Library! 407 13.1 Before Getting Started 407 13.2 The Standard Perl Library 417 13.3 Modules from CPAN 436 13.4 Using Perlbrew and CPAN Minus 441 13.5 What You Should Know 444 13.

6 What''s Next? 445 Exercise 13 I Hid All My Perls in a Package 445 Chapter 14: Bless Those Things! (Object-Oriented Perl) 447 14.1 The OOP Paradigm 447 14.2 Perl Classes, Objects, and Methods--Relating to the Real World 450 14.3 Anonymous Subroutines, Closures, and Privacy 478 14.4 Inheritance 484 14.5 Plain Old Documentation--Documenting a Module 501 14.6 Using Objects from the Perl Library 508 14.7 What You Should Know 512 14.

8 What''s Next? 513 Exercise 14 What''s the Object of This Lesson? 513 Chapter 15: Perl Connects with MySQL 519 15.1 Introduction 519 15.2 What Is a Relational Database? 520 15.3 Getting Started with MySQL 530 15.4 What Is the Perl DBI? 556 15.5 Statements That Don''t Return Anything 579 15.6 Transactions 583 15.7 What''s Left? 590 15.

8 What You Should Know 591 15.9 What''s Next? 591 Exercise 15 Practicing Queries and Using DBI 592 Chapter 16: Interfacing with the System 595 16.1 System Calls 595 16.2 Processes 629 16.3 Other Ways to Interface with the Operating System 658 16.4 Error Handling 664 16.5 Signals and the %SIG Hash 669 16.6 What You Should Know 673 Exercise 16 Interfacing with the System 674 Appendix A: Perl Built-ins, Pragmas, Modules, and the Debugger 675 A.

1 Perl Functions 675 A.2 Special Variables 705 A.3 Perl Pragmas 708 A.4 Perl Modules 710 A.5 Command-Line Switches 716 A.6 Debugger 718 Appendix B: SQL Language Tutorial 723 B.1 What Is SQL? 723 B.2 SQL Data Manipulation Language (DML) 731 B.

3 SQL Data Definition Language 748 B.5 Appendix Summary 770 B.6 What You Should Know 770 Exercise B Do You Speak My Language? 771 Appendix C: Introduction to Moose (A Postmodern Object System for Perl 5) 775 C.1 Getting Started 775 C.2 The Constructor 776 C.3 The Attributes 776 C.4 What About Moo? 795 C.5 Appendix Summary 796 C.

6 References 796 Appendix D: Perlbrew, CPAN, and cpanm 797 D.1 CPAN and @INC 797