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Perl Cookbook

By Tom Christiansen & Nathan Torkington; ISBN 1-56592-243-3, 794 pages, First Edition, August 1998

This book had its genesis in two chapters of the first edition of Programming Perl. Chapters 5 and 6 covered "Common Tasks in Perl" and "Real Perl Programs." Those chapters were highly valued by readers because they showed real applications of the language - how to solve day-to-day tasks using Perl. While revising the Camel, we realized that there was no way to do proper justice to those chapters without publishing the new edition on onionskin paper or in multiple volumes. The book you hold in your hands, published two years after the revised Camel, tries to do proper justice to those chapters. We trust it has been worth the wait.

This book isn't meant to be a complete reference book for Perl, although we do describe some parts of Perl previously undocumented. Having a copy of Programming Perl handy will allow you to look up the exact definition of an operator, keyword, or function. Alternatively, every Perl installation comes with over 1,000 pages of searchable, online reference materials. If those aren't where you can get at them, see your system administrator.

Neither is this book meant to be a bare-bones introduction for programmers who've never seen Perl before. That's what Learning Perl, a kinder and gentler introduction to Perl, is designed for. (If you're on a Microsoft system, you'll probably prefer the Learning Perl on Win32 Systems version.)

Instead, this is a book for learning more Perl. Neither a reference book nor a tutorial book, the Perl Cookbook serves as a companion book to both. It's for people who already know the basics but are wondering how to mix all those ingredients together into a complete program. Spread across 20 chapters and more than 300 focused topic areas affectionately called recipes, this book contains thousands of solutions to everyday challenges encountered by novice and journeyman alike.

We tried hard to make this book useful for both random and sequential access. Each recipe is self-contained, but has a list of references at the end should you need further information on the topic. We've tried to put the simpler, more common recipes toward the front of each chapter and the simpler chapters toward the front of the book. Perl novices should find that these recipes about Perl's basic data types and operators are just what they're looking for. We gradually work our way through topic areas and solutions more geared toward the journeyman Perl programmer. Every now and then we include material that should inspire even the master Perl programmer.

Each chapter begins with an overview of that chapter's topic. This introduction is followed by the main body of each chapter, its recipes. In the spirit of the Perl slogan of TMTOWTDI, "There's more than one way to do it," most recipes show several different techniques for solving the same or closely related problems. These recipes range from short-but-sweet solutions to in-depth mini-tutorials. Where more than one technique is given, we often show costs and benefits of each approach.

As with a traditional cookbook, we expect you to access this book more or less at random. When you want to learn how to do something, you'll look up its recipe. Even if the exact solutions presented don't fit your problem exactly, they'll give you ideas about possible approaches.

Each chapter concludes with one or more complete programs. Although some recipes already include small programs, these longer applications highlight the chapter's principal focus and combine techniques from other chapters, just as any real-world program would. All are useful, and many are used on a daily basis. Some even helped us put this book together.

Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1: Strings
Chapter 2: Numbers
Chapter 3: Dates and Times
Chapter 4: Arrays
Chapter 5: Hashes
Chapter 6: Pattern Matching
Chapter 7: File Access
Chapter 8: File Contents
Chapter 9: Directories
Chapter 10: Subroutines
Chapter 11: References and Records
Chapter 12: Packages, Libraries, and Modules
Chapter 13: Classes, Objects, and Ties
Chapter 14: Database Access
Chapter 15: User Interfaces
Chapter 16: Process Management and Communication
Chapter 17: Sockets
Chapter 18: Internet Services
Chapter 19: CGI Programming
Chapter 20: Web Automation

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