Programming Perl ^{2nd Ed.}

Larry Wall is legendary as the creator of the "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister" that grew up to become the uncontested king of scripting languages. In this，the acknowledged Bible of Perl，Wall joins forces with several leading lights of the Perl community. Together they unveil the many new secrets of Perl version 5，While providing new insight into the old，tried-and-true features of the language.

Not content to dominate the UNIX environment，Perl went on to become master of the World Wide Weg programming environment，where it is the tool of choice for CGI scripts and numerous Web multitude of administrative and projecet-specific tasks across a wide range of platforms in the most portable manner possible.

If Perl itself is the first legend of Larry Wall，this book — affectionately known everywhere as The Camel Book — is the sescond. If you buy only one book about Perl，no one in the Perl community will question your judgment in buying this one.

Contents include：

• An extensive overview of the language and its syntax
• A complete reference for all Perl junctions，operators，and standard library modules
• An explanation of Perl references and complex data structures
• A detailed account of Perl's object-oriented features
• Much more，including efficiency，debugging，invocation options，program security，interprocess communication，autoloading，etc.

1. An Overview of Perl
• Getting Started
• Natural and Artificial Languages
• A Grade Example
• Filehandles
• Operators
• Control Structures
• Regular Expressions
• List Processing
• What You Don't Know Won't Hurt You (Much)
2. The Gory Details
• Lexical Texture
• Built-in Data Types
• Terms
• Pattern Matching
• Operators
• Statements and Declarations
• Subroutines
• Formats
• Special Variables
3. Functions
• Perl Functions by Category
• Perl Functions in Alphabetical Order
4. References and Nested Data Structures
• What Is a Reference?
• Creating Hard References
• Using Hard References
• Symbolic References
• Braces, Brackets, and Quoting
• A Brief Tutorial: Manipulating Lists of Lists
• Data Structure Code Examples
5. Packages, Modules, and Object Classes
• Packages
• Modules
• Objects
• Using Tied Variables
• Some Hints About Object Design
6. Social Engineering
• Cooperating with Command Interpreters
• Cooperating with Other Processes
• Cooperating with Strangers
• Cooperating with Other Languages
7. The Standard Perl Library
• Beyond the Standard Library
• Library Modules
8. Other Oddments
• The Perl Debugger
• Common Goofs for Novices
• Efficiency
• Programming with Style
• Distribution and Installation
• Perl Poetry
• History Made Practical
9. Diagnostic Messages

The definitive guide to Perl. Well-written as well.