Intermediate Perl for AutoSys(AE) Users
Course Description
This course takes people who use Perl a little and turns them into Perl programmers. Building on the foundations of our Introduction to Perl course it will take your Perl programming ability to the next level. This course will enable you to use Perl to tackle just about any problem.
The course comprises of lecture sessions and practical exercises.
Intended Audience
This course is aimed at anyone who uses Perl occasionally but now wants to improve their knowledge of Perl in order to become a competent Perl programmer. In order to get the most out of this course, you should be comfortable writing simple Perl programs using loops, subroutines and CPAN modules. Our Introduction to Perl course provides an ideal background for this course, but we recommend a couple of months of using the skills learned from that course before attending this one.
Key Skills
After attending this course you will be able to:
- Write more complex Perl programs
- Make use of references in your Perl programs
- Reuse your Perl code in modules and classes
- Test your Perl code
- Interact with databases from Perl programs
- Understand simple regular expressions
Course Outline
-
Types of Variable
- Lexical and package variables
- Packages
- “local” variables
-
Strict and Warnings
- The coding safety net
- use strict
- use warnings
-
References
- What is a reference?
- Creating references
- Using references
- Parameter passing
- Complex data structures
-
Sorting
- The sort function
- Sorting blocks and subroutines
- More efficient sorts
-
Reusable Code
- Why write modules?
- A basic module
- How modules work
- Exporter.pm
-
Object Orientation
- What is object orientation?
- A simple object in Perl
- A brief introduction to Moose
- Testing
-
Why test code?
- Testing in Perl
- Perl’s standard testing framework
- The Test Anything Protocol
- Other testing modules
-
Dates and Times
- Perl’s built-in date and time handling
- Date and time modules on CPAN
- Using DateTime.pm and friends
-
Templates
- Why use templates?
- DIY templating
- Templating on CPAN
- The Template Toolkit
- The template equation
- Simple example
-
Databases
- Why use databases?
- Introduction to DBI.pm
- Inserting, selecting, updating and deleting data
- Some efficiency considerations
- Introduction to Object Relational Mapping
-
AutoSys(AE) JIL Manipulation Workshop
- Using Perl to manage JIL
- Using Perl to standardise JIL
-
Further Information
- Books
- Web sites
- Mailing lists
- The Perl community
Course Duration
3 days.
Dave Cross
Course Instructor
Dave Cross is a well known and much respected Perl author, instructor and consultant.
In 1998 Dave started london.pm which has grown to be one of the largest Perl Mongers groups in the world.
He nominally led the group until September 2001. Between August 2002 and June 2006 he was the Perl Mongers User Groups Co-ordinator for the Perl Foundation.
Dave is a regular speaker at Perl and Open Source conferences and is often invited to present tutorials alongside the main conference.
He is the author of "Data Munging with Perl" (Manning, 2001) and a co-author of "Perl Template Toolkit" (O'Reilly, 2003).