Over a decade ago (nearly eternity in Internet Time), Randal Schwartz wrote the first
edition of Learning Perl. In the intervening years, Perl itself has grown
substantially from a "cool" scripting language used primarily by Unix system
administrators to a robust object-oriented programming (OOP) language that runs on
practically every computing platform known to mankind.
Throughout its four editions, Learning Perl remained the same size (about 300 pages)
and continued to cover much of the same material to remain compact and accessible
to the beginning programmer. But there is much more to learn about Perl now than when
that first book was written.
Randal called the first edition of this book Learning Perl Objects, References, and
Modules, and now it's Intermediate Perl, but we like to think of it as just Learning
More Perl.
[*] This is the book that picks up where Learning Perl leaves off. We show
you how to use Perl to write larger programs.
[*] Don't ask why it isn't called that. We must have had 300 emails on the subject.
Okay, ask, since we know you're going to anyway. You never really stop learning Perl,
so Learning More Perl doesn't really tell you much about the book. Our editor chose
the name, which tells you what to expect.
As in Learning Perl, we designed each chapter to be small enough to read in just an
hour or so. Each chapter ends with a series of exercises to help you practice what
you've just learned, and the answers are in the appendix for your reference. And like
Learning Perl, we've developed the material in this book for a teaching environment
and used it in that setting, including for our own use at Stonehenge Consulting
Services, as we conduct on-site and open-enrollment trainings.
You don't have to be a Unix guru, or even a Unix user, to benefit from this book.
Unless otherwise noted, everything in this book applies equally well to Windows
ActivePerl from ActiveState and all other modern implementations of Perl. To us
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