Seminar Abstract

Perl Programming

This seminar is a practical discussion of the Perl programming language (Practical Extraction and Report Language). Perl is a portable language that builds on grep, awk, sed, C, and other languages to provide a tool that allows the quick creation of complex programs. Its primary advantage over a tools like grep or awk is that is can handle binary files (in addition to normal text files).

The emphasis is on topics related to coding including prototyping, data extraction, and use as a shell scripting language. Version 5 and cgi-bin scripting (used with the World Wide Web) are also covered.

Topics to be covered include:

• Data types
• Langauge Syntax
  • Operators (arithmetic and relational)
  • Selection (if/switch)
  • Looping (for, while, do while)
• Advanced Data Types
• File Access
• Libraries
  • Perl libraries
  • C run-time libraries
  • Inter-process communication and Remote procedure calls
• Standards
• Sources

The goal of this seminar is to allow the attendee to understand and utilize Perl. Various issues involving code portability and understandability will also be considered.

Prerequisites of Attendees:

Attendees should be familiar with 3GL programming or shell scripting (Bourne, Korn, BASH, etc.). Knowledge of awk, grep, and sed are helpful but not required. The topics are not environment specific, so UNIX experience is not required, but may be helpful.

Focus:

Intermediate to Advanced level, technical.