Duration:

5 days

Audience:

Employees of federal, state and local governments; and businesses working with the government.

Course Overview:

In this course, you will learn the basics of writing and running Perl scripts. You also will learn how to use more advanced features such as file operations, report writing, the use of regular expressions, working with binary data files, and using the extensive functionality of the standard Perl library. You will immediately be able to use Perl to complete tasks in the real world.

Course Outline:

1. An overview of Perl

  • What is Perl?
  • Perl is compiled and interpreted
  • Perl Advantages and Disadvantages
  • Downloading and Installing Perl
  • Which version of Perl
  • Getting Help

2. Creating and running Perl programs

  • Structure of a Perl program
  • Running a Perl script
  • Checking syntax and warnings
  • Execution of scripts under UNIX and Windows

3. Basic Data and I/O

  • Numeric and Text literals
  • Math operators and expressions
  • Scalar variables
  • Default values
  • Writing to standard output
  • Command line arguments
  • Reading from the standard input

4. Logic and Loops

  • About flow control
  • The if statement and Boolean values
  • Using unless and elsif
  • Statement modifiers
  • warn() and die()
  • The conditional construct
  • Using while loop and its variants
  • Using the for loop
  • Exiting from loops

5. Lists and Arrays

  • The list data type
  • Accessing array elements
  • Creating arrays
  • List interpolation
  • Arrays and memory
  • Counting elements
  • Iterating through an array
  • List evaluation
  • Slices and ranges

6. Reading and writing text files

  • File I/O Overview
  • Opening a file
  • Reading text files
  • Writing to a text file
  • Arrays and file I/O
  • Using the <> operator

7. List functions

  • Growing and shrinking arrays
  • The split() function
  • Splitting on whitespace
  • Assigning to literal lists
  • The join() function
  • The sort() function
  • Alternate sort keys
  • Reversing an array

8. Formatting output

  • Using sprintf() and printf()
  • Report formatting overview
  • Defining report formats
  • The write() function
  • Advanced filehandle magic

9. Hashes

  • Hash overview
  • Creating hashes
  • Hash attributes
  • Traversing a hash
  • Testing for existence of elements
  • Deleting hash elements

10. References

  • What is a reference?
  • The two ways to create references
  • References to existing data
  • References to anonymous data
  • Dereferencing scalar, array, and ash references
  • Dereferencing elements of arrays and hashes
  • Multidimensional arrays and other data structures

11. Text and Regular Expressions

  • String length
  • The substr() function
  • The index() and rindex() functions
  • String replication
  • Pattern matching and substitution
  • Regular expressions

12. Raw file and data access

  • Opening and closing raw (binary) files
  • Reading raw data
  • Using seek() and tell()
  • Writing raw data
  • Raw data manipulation with pack()and unpack()

13. Subroutines and variable scope

  • Understanding packages
  • Package and Lexical variables
  • Localizing builtin variables
  • Declaring and calling subroutines
  • Calling subroutines
  • Passing parameters and returning values

14. Working with the operating system

  • Determining current OS
  • Environment variables
  • Running external programs
  • User identification
  • Trapping signals
  • File test operators
  • Working with files
  • Time of day

15. Shortcuts and defaults

  • Understanding $_
  • shift() with no array specified
  • Text file processing
  • Using grep() and Using map()
  • Command-line options forfile processing

16. Data wrangling

  • Quoting in Perl
  • Evaluating arrays
  • Understanding qw( )
  • Getting more out of the <> operator
  • Read ranges of lines
  • Using m//g in scalar context
  • The /o modifier
  • Working with embedded newlines
  • Making REs more readable
  • Perl data conversion

17. Using the Perl Library

  • The Perl library
  • Old-style library files
  • Perl modules
  • Modules bundled with Perl
  • A selection of modules
  • Getting modules from ActiveState
  • Getting modules from CPAN
  • Using Getopt::Long

18. Some Useful Tools

  • Sending and receiving files with Net::FTP
  • Using File::Find to search for files and directories
  • Grabbing a Web page
  • Some good places to find scripts
  • Perl man pages for more information
  • Zipping and unzipping files