Perl is a mature, extremely flexible, general-purpose programming language, which is especially well-suited to textual manipulation. Such Perl capabilities have been applied by a wide range of professionals in both systems support and programming fields for various applications. These include: manipulating text and data, database access, CGI programming, HTML generation, and parsing and generating XML files. Extensions to Perl provide GUI facilities and connections to a large variety of proprietary DBMSs; the course examines the GUI Perl/Tk package and illustrates the use of a variety of DBMSs and pseudo-DBMSs.
This nominally 2-day course provides a comprehensive examination of some of the applications for which Perl is commonly employed. In many cases these applications are combined (eg database access via CGI and DBI) and the practical sessions emphasise this.
The course also optionally provides a brief overview of other selected applications. Optionally additional sessions can be scheduled to provide the essential skills in non-Perl techniques that these applications may require, such as HTML and SQL coding.
Experienced developers who have a firm foundation in the Perl language and need to apply their skills to the development of particular applications; systems analysts and designers targeting applications to be delivered via Perl.
For one organisation carefully-selected topics from Perl Introduction/Intermediate and Perl Advanced can be combined with appropriate application topics to provide a course to support the skillsets required for particular projects. Also for one organisation, for those without prior knowledge of the non-Perl techniques, relevant primer sessions can be included.
Students should have a solid understanding of basic and intermediate Perl concepts and constructs, including handling arrays and hashes, reading and writing line-orientated text files, and simple regular expressions.