Simmons College GSLIS Continuing Education Program – Saturday, October 21, 2006.
This workshop is for those who have mastered the basics of Perl and now want to gain the skills to develop more powerful programs.
In the first half, we will discuss how to use hashes and arrays to manage your programs’ data; write a simple CGI script that accepts input from a web form and connects to a database to perform queries and updates; explore advanced pattern matching features that enable more powerful, flexible parsing of text and data; and learn how to use Perl to process and produce XML data files.
In the second half, you will develop a Perl module and write a simple test to make sure it works correctly. We will explore the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), a vast repository of several thousand open-source modules that is an essential resource for Perl programmers; you will learn how to evaluate, download, install, and use third-party modules found there. Finally, with your new skills, you will install a CPAN module and use it to import a file of MARC records into a database, query the data, and generate a set of webpages.
Throughout the workshop, we will discuss how to write leaner, more robust code, handle errors gracefully, and safely deal with missing or malformed input. You will leave the workshop with new skills and the know-how to take your Perl programs to the next level.
Slides:
Most files are contained in this Zip archive: ceperl.zip
Additional scripts: