This is a book for those of us who believed that we didn't need to learn Perl, and now we know it is more ubiquitous than ever. Perl is extremely flexible and powerful, and it isn't afraid of Web 2.0 or the cloud. Originally touted as the duct tape of the Internet, Perl has since evolved into a multipurpose, multiplatform language present absolutely everywhere: heavy-duty web applications, the cloud, systems administration, natural language processing, and financial engineering. Beginning Perl, Third Edition provides valuable insight into Perl's role regarding all of these tasks and more. Commencing with a comprehensive overview of language basics, you'll learn all about important concepts such as Perl's data types and control flow constructs. This material sets the stage for a discussion of more complex topics, such as writing custom functions, using regular expressions, and file input and output. Next, the book moves on to the advanced topics of object-oriented programming, modules, web programming, and database administration with Perl's powerful database interface module, DBI. The examples and code provided offer you all of the information you need to start writing your own powerful scripts to solve the problems listed above, and many more. Whether you are a complete novice or an experienced programmer, Beginning Perl, Third Edition offers an ideal guide to learning Perl. What you'll learn * How to use the power of Perl * How to handle Perl data structures * How to build database applications regardless of the underlying database * How to parse complex data * How to write industrial-strength object-oriented Perl * How to start web programming in Perl Who this book is for This book is for programmers of all shades and persuasions who thought they could do without Perl. Think again. Table of Contents * First Steps in Perl * Scalars * Control Flow Constructs * Lists and Arrays * Hashes * Subroutines/Functions * Regular Expressions * Files and Data * String Processing * Interfacing to the Operating System * References * Modules * Object-Oriented Perl * Introduction to CGI * Perl and DBI