Introduction Perl Programming Essentials (TT4925)

Course Objectives

Need different skills or topics?  If your team requires different topics or tools, additional skills or custom approach, this course may be further adjusted to accommodate.  We offer additional Perl, Python, web development, data science, machine learning and other related topics that may be blended with this course for a track that best suits your needs. Our team will collaborate with you to understand your needs and will target the course to focus on your specific learning objectives and goals.

Course Prerequisites

This course is appropriate for anyone who wants to create applications or modules to automate and simplify common tasks with Perl.  Students should already have a working, user-level knowledge of an operating system such as UNIX or Windows. While not mandatory, basic skills with at least one other programming language are desirable.

Course Agenda

Please note that this list of topics is based on our standard course offering, evolved from typical industry uses and trends. We will work with you to tune this course and level of coverage to target the skills you need most.

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: Formatting output

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

Session: Hashes

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

Session: 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

Session: Text and Regular Expressions

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

Session: 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()

Session: Subroutines and variable scope

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

Session: 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

Session: Shortcuts and defaults

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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Session: 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

Course Materials

Student Materials: Each student will receive a Student Guide with course notes, code samples, software tutorials, diagrams and related reference materials and links (as applicable). Our courses also include step by step hands-on lab instructions and and solutions, clearly illustrated for users to complete hands-on work in class, and to revisit to review or refresh skills at any time. Students will also receive related (as applicable) project files, code files, data sets and solutions required for the hands-on work.

Classroom Setup Made Simple:  Our dedicated tech team will work with you to ensure your classroom and lab environment is setup, tested and ready to go well in advance of the course delivery date, ensuring a smooth start to class and seamless hands-on experience for your students. We offer several flexible student machine setup options including guided manual set up for simple installation directly on student machines, or cloud based / remote hosted lab solutions where students can log in to a complete separate lab environment minus any installations, or we can supply complete turn-key, pre-loaded equipment to bring ready-to-go student machines to your facility.  Please inquire for details, options and pricing