Mastering Perl

Supercharge your Perl knowledge with advanced concepts to make coding easier, maintenance simpler, and execution faster. It’s possible with this thoroughly updated edition of Mastering Perl, the third in O’Reilly’s series of landmark Perl tutorials.

This book isn’t a collection of clever tricks, but a way of thinking about Perl programming so you can solve real-life problems of debugging, maintenance, configuration, and other tasks you encounter as a working programmer. If you’re familiar with Programming Perl, this book provides insights into several advanced topics.

• Use advanced regular expressions, including global matches, lookarounds, readable regexes, and regex debugging
• Avoid common 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 it 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 to detect errors Perl doesn’t report

brian d foy is a prolific Perl trainer and writer, and runs The Perl Review to help people use and understand Perl through educational, consulting, code review, and more. He's a frequent speaker at Perl conferences. He's the co-author of Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl, and Effective Perl Programming, and the author of Mastering Perl. He was been an instructor and author for Stonehenge Consulting Services from 1998 to 2009, a Perl user since he was a physics graduate student, and a die-hard Mac user since he first owned a computer. He founded the first Perl user group, the New York Perl Mongers, as well as the Perl advocacy nonprofit Perl Mongers, Inc., which helped form more than 200 Perl user groups across the globe. He maintains the perlfaq portions of the core Perl documentation, several modules on CPAN, and some stand-alone scripts.

Randal L. Schwartz is a two-decade veteran of the software industry. He is skilled in software design, system administration, security, technical writing, and training. Randal has coauthored the "must-have" standards: Programming Perl, Learning Perl, Learning Perl for Win32 Systems, and Effective Perl Learning, and is a regular columnist for WebTechniques, PerformanceComputing, SysAdmin, and Linux magazines.

He is also a frequent contributor to the Perl newsgroups, and has moderated comp.lang.perl.announce since its inception. His offbeat humor and technical mastery have reached legendary proportions worldwide (but he probably started some of those legends himself). Randal's desire to give back to the Perl community inspired him to help create and provide initial funding for The Perl Institute. He is also a founding board member of the Perl Mongers (perl.org), the worldwide Perl grassroots advocacy organization. Since 1985, Randal has owned and operated Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. Randal can be reached for comment at merlyn@stonehenge.com or (503) 777-0095, and welcomes questions on Perl and other related topics.