About the Book

In its first five years of existence, The Perl Journal ran 247 articles by over 120 authors. Every serious Perl programmer subscribed to it, and every notable Perl guru jumped at the opportunity to write for it. TPJ explained critical topics such as regular expressions, databases, and object-oriented programming, and demonstrated Perl's utility for fields as diverse as astronomy, biology, economics, AI, and games. The magazine gave birth to both the Obfuscated Perl Contest and the Perl Poetry contest, and remains a proud and timeless achievement of Perl during one of its most exciting periods of development.Computer Science and Perl Programming is the first volume of The Best of the Perl Journal, compiled and re-edited by the original editor and publisher of The Perl Journal, Jon Orwant. In this series, we've taken the very best (and still relevant) articles published in TPJ over its 5 years of publication and immortalized them into three volumes. This volume has 70 articles devoted to hard-core computer science, advanced programming techniques, and the underlying mechanics of Perl.Here's a sample of what you'll find inside:

• Jeffrey Friedl on Understanding Regexes
• Mark Jason Dominus on optimizing your Perl programs with Memoization
• Damian Conway on Parsing
• Tim Meadowcroft on integrating Perl with Microsoft Office
• Larry Wall on the culture of Perl

Written by 41 of the most prominent and prolific members of the closely-knit Perl community, this anthology does what no other book can, giving unique insight into the real-life applications and powerful techniques made possible by Perl.Other books tell you how to use Perl, but this book goes far beyond that: it shows you not only how to use Perl, but what you could use Perl for. This is more than just The Best of the Perl Journal -- in many ways, this is the best of Perl.

Table of Contents:
Foreword Preface 1. Introduction Part I. Beginner Concepts 2. All About Arrays 3. Perfect Programming 4. Precedence 5. The Birth of a One-Liner 6. Comparators, Sorting, and Hashes 7. What Is Truth? 8. Using Object-Oriented Modules 9. Unreal Numbers 10. CryptoContext 11. References 12. Perl Heresies Part II. Regular Expressions 13. Understanding Regular Expressions, Part I 14. Understanding Regular Expressions, Part II 15. Understanding Regular Expressions, Part III 16. Nibbling Strings 17. How Regexes Work Part III. Computer Science 18. Infinite Lists 19. Compression 20. Memoization 21. Parsing 22. Trees 23. B-Trees 24. Making Life and Death Decisions with Perl 25. Information Retrieval 26. Randomness 27. Random Number Generators and XS Part IV. Programming Techniques 28. Just the FAQs: Suffering from Buffering 29. Scoping 30. Seven Useful Uses of local 31. Parsing Command-line Options 32. Building a Better Hash with tie 33. Source Filters 34. Overloading 35. Building Objects Out of Arrays 36. Hiding Objects with Closures 37. Multiple Dispatch in Perl Part V. Software Development 38. Using Other Languages from Perl 39. SWIG 40. Benchmarking 41. Building Software with Cons 42. MakeMaker 43. Autoloading Perl code 44. Debugging and Devel:: Part VI. Networking 45. E-mail with Attachments 46. Sending Mail Without sendmail 47. Filtering Mail 48. Net::Telnet 49. Microsoft Office 50. Client-Server Applications 51. Managing Streaming Audio 52. A Napster Client Library 53. A 74-line IP Telephone 54. Controlling Modems 55. Using Usenet from Perl 56. Transferring Files with FTP 57. Spidering an FTP Site 58. DNS Updates With Perl Part VII. Databases 59. DBI 60. Using DBI with Microsoft Access 61. DBI Caveats 62. Beyond Hardcoded Database Applications with DBIx::Recordset 63. Win32::ODBC 64. Net::LDAP 65. Web Databases the Genome Project Way 66. Spreadsheet::WriteExcel Part VIII. Internals 67. How To Improve Perl 68. Components of the Perl Distribution 69. Basic Perl Anatomy 70. Lexical Analysis 71. Debugging Perl Programs with -D 72. Microperl Index About the Authors