Learn Perl 5 By Doing It

Learn Perl by actually creating useful, working Perl programs for everything from web scraping to fixing your data.

What you'll learn
Learn how to use Perl for a variety of common tasks
Learn how to use regular expressions
Requirements
Basic knowledge of computer programming in any language.
Description
Discover some of the amazing things you can do with Perl 5, including downloading text and images from the Internet (just like Zuckerberg in The Social Network), reformatting data, importing and exporting data to and from databases, sysadmin-type tasks like renaming or moving files, fixing even huge amounts of data quickly and even creating web CGI scripts. In this course you'll also learn how to use regular expressions, those unbelievably useful little things that have now made their way into almost every serious programming language, yet remain the bête noire of many a developer.

Overview

Section 1: Basic Perl: Getting Started

Lecture 1 Installing Perl and Some Great Free Editors

Lecture 2 Hello World

Lecture 3 Downloading Text and Images With Perl, Just Like Zuckerberg

Lecture 4 Arrays and Checking Whether Files Exist

Lecture 5 Reading Files and Beginning Regular Expressions

Lecture 6 Writing Files and Replacing Text

Lecture 7 Wildcards in Regular Expressions

Lecture 8 Groups: Finding Out What You Actually Matched

Lecture 9 Quantifiers: Greedy vs. Non-Greedy

Lecture 10 Escape Sequences

Lecture 11 Numeric Quantifiers

Lecture 12 Test Your Perl and Regex Knowlege - First Test

Section 2: More on Reading Files Line By Line: Tips, Tricks and Vital Knowledge

Lecture 13 Split and Reading CSV Files

Lecture 14 Join and Viewing Data Using Data::Dumper

Lecture 15 Chomp and Removing Spaces in Splits

Lecture 16 "Pushing" Onto Arrays

Lecture 17 Arrays of Arrays

Lecture 18 Hashes: Lookup Tables in Perl

Lecture 19 Iterating Over Hashes

Lecture 20 Arrays of Hashes

Lecture 21 Storing CSV Data in a Data Structure

Lecture 22 Validating CSV Data

Lecture 23 Cleaning CSV Data

Lecture 24 Test Your Perl and Regex Knowlege - Second Test

Section 3: Web Scraping and More Regular Expressions

Lecture 25 Basic Web Scraping

Lecture 26 Character Classes

Lecture 27 Matching Repeatedly

Lecture 28 Collecting Repeated Matches All At Once

Section 4: Building a Complete Progam: Command Line Options

Lecture 29 Getting Command Line Options

Lecture 30 Subroutines and Returning Values

Lecture 31 Multi-Line Strings and Comments

Lecture 32 Passing Arguments to Subroutines

Lecture 33 References to Hashes

Lecture 34 Checking Values in Hashes

Section 5: Parsing XML and Complex Data Structures

Lecture 35 Finding All Files in a Directory and Filtering Arrays

Lecture 36 Processing Files One By One

Lecture 37 Parsing XML with Regular Expressions

Lecture 38 Using XML::Simple, and Extracting Data from Complex Structures

Lecture 39 Extracting Data from Complex Structures: A Complete Example

Lecture 40 Building Complex Data Structures

Section 6: Working with Databases

Lecture 41 Free Databases to Use with Perl

Lecture 42 Creating Databases with MySQL

Lecture 43 Connecting to a Database

Lecture 44 Inserting Data into a Database

Lecture 45 Deleting Data and Executing Dataless SQL Commands

Lecture 46 Getting the IDs of Records You've Just Inserted

Lecture 47 Querying Databases

Lecture 48 Exporting Data

Section 7: Perl One-Liners

Lecture 49 Running One-Line Perl Programs

Lecture 50 Replacing Text in Files

Lecture 51 Editing Files In-Place

Section 8: Modules and OO Perl

Lecture 52 Modules

Lecture 53 Packages and Directories

Lecture 54 Object Orientation: A Brief Introduction

Lecture 55 Implementing OO in Perl

Section 9: Web Application Basics

Lecture 56 Installing the Apache HTTP Server

Lecture 57 A Hello World Web App

Lecture 58 The CGI.pm Module

Lecture 59 Using URL Parameters

Lecture 60 Website Forms

Section 10: Basic Sysadmin Tasks

Lecture 61 Moving, Copying and Deleting Files

Lecture 62 Executing System Commands

Section 11: Conclusion

Lecture 63 Where to Find Documentation and More Modules

Section 12: Appendix 1: Example Data

Lecture 64 XML Files

Section 13: Appendix 2: Alternate Systems

Lecture 65 Running Perl in UNIX, Linux, Mac and Cygwin

Section 14: Extras

Lecture 66 Arrays and Hashes Review

Lecture 67 References to Hashes and Arrays Review

Anyone who has some familiarity with basic programming in any language,Anyone who wants to learn how to automate common tasks in IT