This is the third in O'Reilly's series of landmark Perl tutorials, which started with Learning Perl , the bestselling introduction that taught you the basics of Perl syntax, and Intermediate Perl , which taught you how to create re-usable Perl software. Mastering Perl pulls everything together to show you how to bend Perl to your will. It convey's Perl's special models and programming idioms.
This book isn't a collection of clever tricks, but a way of thinking about Perl programming so you can integrate the real-life problems of debugging, maintenance, configuration, and other tasks 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 programing problems with secure programming techniques
- Profile and benchmark Perl to find out 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
- Learn how you can detect errors Perl doesn't report, and how to tell users about them
- Let your Perl program talk back to you by using Log4perl
- Store data for later use in another program, a later run of the same program, or to send them over a network
- Write programs as modules to get the benefit of Perl's distribution and testing tools