16 of the Best Free Perl Books - Part 2

5. Impatient Perl

Impatient Perl is designed for individuals who wish to learn Perl or individuals that already program in Perl and do not have the patience to search for information to learn and use Perl. The book should be a useful desk reference for common Perl related questions.

Topics covered include:

• The three basic storage types:
• Scalars - store strings, numbers (integers and floats), references, and filehandles
• Arrays - stores a collection of scalars via an integer index
• Hashes - stores scalars that are accessed via a string index
• List Context - a concept built into the grammar of Perl
• References - points to something else
• Control Flow - allow developers to alter the order of execution while the application is running
• Packages and Namespaces and Lexical Scoping
• Subroutines
• Compiling and Interpreting - compiling translates the source test into machine usable internal format; intrepreting - executing the machine usable, internal format
• Code Reuse, Perl Modules - a discrete component of software for the Perl programming language
• The use Statement - allows a Perl script to bring in a Perl module and what declarations that have been made available by the module
• bless() - this function changes the string that would be returned when ref() is called
• Method Calls
• Procedural Perl
• Object Oriented Perl
• Object Oriented Review
• CPAN - Comprehensive Perl Archive Nework which contains a huge number of Perl modules to download
• The Next Level
• Command Line Arguments
• File Input and Output - Perl has functions used for reading from and writing to files
• Operating System Commands
• Regular Expressions - the text processing workhouse of Perl. Regular expressions lets you search strings for patterns, find out what matched the patterns, and substitute the matched patterns with new strings
• Modifiers - regular expressions can take optional modifiers that tell Perl additional information about how to interpret the regular expression
• Parsing with Parse::RecDescent
• Perl, GUI and Tk

This book is made available under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or later.

6. Using Perl 6

Using Perl 6 is a work-in-progress book that is an example-drive introduction to Perl 6.

The book explores:

• Operators - very short names for often used routines
• Subroutines and Signatures covering declaring a subroutine, adding signatures, returning results, return types, working with types, abstract and concrete parameters, captures, unpacking, currying, introspection, and the main subroutine
• Classes and Objects
• Multis covering constraints, narrowness, multiple arguments, bindability checks, nested signatures in multi-dispatch, protos, toying with the candidate list, and multiple main subs
• Roles - standalone, named and reusable units of behavior
• Subtypes
• Pattern matching - regular expressions are explored
• Grammars - organise regular expressions
• Built-in types, operators and methods

This book is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

7. Extreme Programming in Perl

Extreme Perl is a book about Extreme Programming, a software development methodology that enables users, business people, programmers, and computers to communicate effectively, using the programming language Perl.

This book invites Perl programmers and their customers to take a fresh look at software development. Customers, and business people in general, will learn how Extreme Programming enables customer-programmer communication for efficient and flexible requirements gathering. Programmers will see how the methodology's focus on teamwork, incremental testing, and continuous design allows them to take pride in their craft.

Areas covered include:

• Release Planning
• Iteration Planning
• Pair Programming
• Tracking
• Acceptance Testing
• Coding Style
• Logistics
• Test Driven Design
• Continuous Design
• Unit Testing
• Refactoring

8. Perl & LWP

Perl & LWP instructs how individuals can write web client applications with LWP and its related HTML modules. Library for WWW in Perl is a set of modules that allow requests to be sent to the web.

The book has chapters on:

• Web Basics
• The LWP Class Model
• URLs
• Forms
• Simple HTML Processing with Regular Expressions
• HTML Processing with Tokens
• Tokenizing Walkthrough
• HTML Processing with Trees
• Modifying HTML with Trees
• Cookies, Authentication and Advanced Requests
• Spiders

This book is aimed at someone who already knows Perl and HTML.