Perl Programming

Perl is becoming a essential programming langauage that every system and database administrator need to know to perform their day to day tasks much effeciently. At Ahana we recognise the importance of Perl with in the infrastructure space and therefore launched a four day PERL course. Our tutors themselves have been in IT Infrastructure industry for a number of years and have a very vast experience in PERL programming.

What we cover

Day 1




Introduction to PERL

Variables - Scalars, Arrays and Hashes

• Scalar data - Numbers and Strings
• Scalar variables
• "print" function for output
• Getting user input using
• "chomp" and "chop" function
• "undef" value and "defined" function
• Defining Arrays and accessing Array elements
• Special Array Indices
• Array functions - pop, push, shift, unshift, reverse, sort
• Defining and accessing Hash Data Structure
• Hash functions - keys, values, each, exists, delete
• Exercise

Control Structures and I/O Basics

• comparison operators
• Associatively and precedence of operators
• perl's default variables $_ and @_
• "if" control structure
• "while" control structure
• Input from diamond <> operator and @ARGV
• "foreach" control structure
• "unless" and "until" control structure
• "else" and "elsif" clause
• "for" control structure
• Loop Controls - last, next, redo, Labelled blocks
• Logical operators - && and ||
• Ternary Operator, ?
• Formatted output with "printf"
• Exercises




Day 2




Subroutines

• Functions - System and User defined
• Defining and Invoking Subroutines
• Passing values to subroutines
• Returning values from subroutines
• Subroutine private variables - "my" and "local"
• When to omit ampersand
• "strict" pragma
• Exercises

Regular Expressions

• What are regular expressions
• Simple patterns, Metacharacters, Quantifiers, Grouping, Alternatives
• Understanding $`, $& and $'
• Character Classes and Character class shortcuts
• General Quantifiers
• Anchors and Mem Parentheses (Back references/Memory Variables)
• Exercises




Day 3




Regular Expressions (Cont.)

• Case insensitive pattern matching
• Binding Operator
• Substitutions and global replacements
• Case Shifting
• "split" and "join" functions
• Exercises

File and Directory operations

• Understanding Filehandles and Standard Filehandles
• Opening, Using and Closing Filehandles
• Function "die" and "warn"
• Changing default output Filehandle
• File Tests
• Traversing around directories
• Globbing
• Directory Handles
• Creating, Removing, Renaming files and directories
• Modifying permissions, ownership, timestamp etc
• Exercises

Process Management

• Function "system" and interacting with the shel
l
• Function "exec"
• Builtin hash %ENV
• Backquotes
• Processes and Filehandles
• Using "fork" function
• Function "waitpid"
• Signals and function "kill"
• Exercises

Strings and Sorting

• Functions "index" and "rindex"
• Function "substr"
• Function "sprintf"




Day 4




Understanding references

Complex Data Structures

• Arrays of Arrays
• Hashes of Arrays
• Arrays of Hashes
• Hashes of Hashes

Packages, Libraries and Modules

• Understanding packages
• Libraries, Functions "do" and "require", @INC and %INC
• Understanding and using modules
• BEGIN block
• CPAN and some simple modules

DBI module

• Database programming using DBI module
• Defining a SQL string using DBI

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