Perl
Introduction
As you may know, perl is very much my programming language of choice. Here I am keeping a sort of depository for any helpful things I've come across on my travels. I've found that the best way to learn more about a language is to follow posts on perl-related message boards and try and answer the questions of others, along with downloading scripts and trying to figure out what is going on. I've included here a number of links to websites, useful threads on the message boards I frequent, and any helpful code snippets I've come across and felt were worth keeping. This is as much for my reference as anyone else's but I hope it'll be useful to someone.
Before you go anywhere
- Perl Documentation
- All the Perl docs in pretty HTML format.
- Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN)
- Maybe someone's done it before
Message Boards
(I do my posting in these forums under the handle 'ishnid')
Useful Threads
- use CGI or die;
- Why everybody should be using CGI.pm for CGI scripts (Perlmonks)
- Death to dot star
- Avoiding the .* construct in regular expressions. (Perlmonks)
- Floating point numbers
- Dealing with floating point inaccuracies (DevShed)
- CGI::Application and CGI::Session in tandem
- (DevShed)
- DBI data extractions
- (DevShed)
- A discussion on CGI.pm's advantages
- (DevShed)
- Password Encryption
- (DevShed)
Articles and Tutorials
- Use strict and warnings
- The beginnings of good coding practice
- Placeholders in DBI
- What are placeholders, and why would I want to use them?
- Why it's stupid to use a variable as a variable name
- Avoiding the use of soft references
- What is Scalar Context?
- Quick description of the differences between list and scalar context.
- Ovid's "Web Programming Using Perl" Course
- There are many, many lousy tutorials out there that teach code that may work but is so inefficient/insecure that you'd be better off not reading them at all. This one is a must-read for any Web Developer aspirants
- Coping with Scoping
- Understanding scoping and namespaces
- HTML::Template Tutorial
- Tutorial on using the HTML::Template module to produce dynamic web output Using HTML::Template: Another HTML::Template tutorial from perlmonks.
- Writing modules
- From www.informit.com
- How to use Quotes in Perl
- Not as straightforward as it sounds. Good article on various methods of quoting strings and lists in Perl, including an explanation of the oft-confused ' and "
- Setting up Apache on your Windows
- Test your scripts on your own machine
- Why use CGI.pm?
- Article from Perl Horizons on using the CGI module