SUMMARY:   Perl is a mature, extremely flexible, general purpose language, which is especially well suited to textual manipulation. In addition to its comprehensive built-in facilities, there are a large number of freely accessible libraries of Perl code to help build a wide range of applications. And it is available free-of-charge. PERL Part 1 - BASICS provides delegates with the knowledge and skills necessary to develop scalable cross platform applications using the Perl programming language. This course teaches the basic concepts and capabilities of the Perl program scripting language. Upon completion, delegates will be able to use Perl to perform data processing tasks, file and directory management, and some system administration tasks. This highly -practical course discusses Perl in the Windows and Red Hat Linux environments, although the course is applicable to other platforms. AUDIENCE:   This course is valuable for technical users, application programmers, and system programmers. PREREQUISITES:   Delegates should have basic user level knowledge of an operating system such as Unix or Windows. Any programming experience would be an advantage. DURATION:   4 Days OBJECTIVES:   Specify the features and uses of Perl. Describe and use literals and variables. Use Perl arrays and associative memory. Describe and use programming control structures. List and use operators. Format and print program output. Perform basic file manipulation. Access and manipulate directory information. Create and use functions. Describe and use regular expression characters. User Perl to perform Unix-like operations. COURSE CONTENT:   Background, rationale and purpose of Perl 1.1 What is Perl? 1.2 Benefits and Concerns for Perl 1.3 CPAN 1.4 Installing Perl 1.4 Perl Program Concepts 1.5 Simple Perl Programs Explained 1.6 Compiling and Executing Perl Programs 1.7 Documentation with perldoc 1.8 Lab: Writing and testing simple Perl programs Scalar Data, variables and operators 2.1 Number literals and operators 2.2 String literals and operators 2.3 Automatic conversion 2.4 Working with Scalar Variables 2.5 The use strict Pragma 2.6 Variable Interpolation 2.7 Operator Precedence and Associativity 2.8 AutoIncrement and AutoDecrement 2.9 Input with <STDIN> 2.10 chomp() 2.11 Lab: Writing interactive programs Formatting and Printing 3.1 Output with print() 3.2 Formatted output with printf() 3.3 Lab: Formatted output using Perl Control structures 4.1 Blocks 4.2 if condition 4.3 else clause 4.4 nested if conditions 4.5 unless condition 4.6 elsif clause 4.7 Ternary Operator? 4.8 Boolean values 4.9 Logical Operators 4.10 while iteration 4.11 until iteration  4.12 undef and defined 4.13 for 4.14 last, next and redo 4.15 Labelled Blocks 4.16 Logical Operators 4.17 Short-circuit Operation 4.18 Lab: Writing simple Perl programs using conditions and iterations Lists and Arrays 5.1 List Concepts 5.2 List Literals 5.3 qw 5.4 foreach and $_ 5.5 List assignment 5.6 Array Concepts 5.7 Array Assignment 5.8 Array Element Assignment 5.9 Special Array Indexes 5.10 push() and pop() 5.11 shift() and unshift() 5.12 sort() and reverse() 5.13 Context 5.14 Lab: Writing Perl programs to manipulate lists and arrays Functions 6.1 Modular Programming 6.2 Function concepts 6.3 Creating a subroutine 6.4 Calling a subroutine 6.5 Subroutine arguments 6.6 Returning a value. 6.7 my vs local 6.8 Variable Length Parameter Lists 6.9 Lab: Developing modular programs in Perl Hashes 7.1 Hash Concepts 7.2 Assigning values to a Hash 7.3 Accessing a Hash 7.4 keys() and values() 7.5 each() and exists() 7.6 delete() 7.7 Lab: Using Hashes to manage data Debugging Perl Scripts 8.1 Debugging Concepts 8.2 The Perl Debugger 8.3 Using the Debugging Commands 8.4 Lab: Debugging Perl Programs Input/Output 9.1 Input/Output Concepts 9.2 Using <STDIN> 9.3 Using <> 9.4 Using @ARGV 9.5 Processing <STDERR> 9.6 Lab:  Perl problems using further input and output Pattern matching with Regular expressions 10.1 Patterns Concepts 10.2 Metacharacters 10.3 Character Classes 10.4 Quantifiers 10.5 Anchors 10.6 Memory Parentheses 10.7 Precedence 10.8 Matches with m// 10.9 Option modifiers 10.10 Binding Operator =~ 10.11 Interpolating into Patterns 10.11 Match Variables 10.12 Matches with s/// 10.13 split() and join() 10.14 Lab: Searching/Replacing text using Regular expressions Files and Directories 11.1 File Organization 11.2 Filehandle Concepts 11.3 Opening files 11.4 warn and die 11.5 Reading and writing files 11.6 File Tests 11.7 Globbing() 11.8 Closing Files 11.9 unlink and rename 11.10 Opening Directories 11.11 Working with Directories 11.12 Closing Directories 11.13 chdir, mkdir, rmdir 11.14 stat() and lstat() 11.15 localtime() 11.16 link and symlink 11.17 chmod, chown, utime 11.18 Lab: Manipulating Files and Directories Process Management 12.1 system() 12.2 Environment Variables 12.3 Backquotes (``) 12.4 Processes as FileHandles 12.5 fork() and exec() 12.6 Sending and Receiving Signals 12.7 Lab: Working with Processes GH/06