Development
Programming Languages
Perl
Learn Perl 5 By Doing It
4.2 (1,608 ratings)
Course Ratings are calculated from individual students’ ratings and a variety of other signals, like age of rating and reliability, to ensure that they reflect course quality fairly and accurately.
10,598 students enrolled

Learn Perl 5 By Doing It

Learn Perl by actually creating useful, working Perl programs for everything from web scraping to fixing your data.
4.2 (1,608 ratings)
Course Ratings are calculated from individual students’ ratings and a variety of other signals, like age of rating and reliability, to ensure that they reflect course quality fairly and accurately.
10,598 students enrolled
Created by John Purcell
Last updated 5/2013
English
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Learn Perl 5 By Doing It
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This course includes
  • 14 hours on-demand video
  • 1 article
  • 54 downloadable resources
  • Full lifetime access
  • Access on mobile and TV
  • Certificate of Completion
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What you'll learn
  • Learn how to use Perl for a variety of common tasks
  • Learn how to use regular expressions
Course content
Expand all 67 lectures 14:02:37
+ – Basic Perl: Getting Started
12 lectures 02:37:28
An overview of what kind of stuff is going to be in the course, various options for installing Perl and a bit about various free editors.
Installing Perl and Some Great Free Editors
Preview 11:56
A simple "hello world" program in Perl. But not just a one liner .... in fact, we're going to put some stuff in this that will provide us with a great start for any Perl program.
Hello World
Preview 06:19

In "The Social Network", the character based on Mark Zuckerberg uses Perl to download images from the Internet. It's easier than you think, and we'll see how to do it in this tutorial. NOTE: My website has been updated since this tutorial, so please choose a different image to download other than my logo when you try this tutorial. Or, download my logo, but please be aware that the path has changed. You can easily find the new path by right-clicking the image you want to download in your browser, going to "view image" or the equivalent, and noting the path.

Downloading Text and Images With Perl, Just Like Zuckerberg
Preview 14:05
Perl is great for moving files around, deleting files, renaming them, etc. Let's take a look at how we can check if a whole batch of files exist, learning to use arrays along the way.
Arrays and Checking Whether Files Exist
Preview 15:03
In this tutorial we'll look at how to read text files in Perl. We'll also start looking at regular expressions! Do not be afraid -- soon, with a little practice, regular expressions will be like unto a brother.
Reading Files and Beginning Regular Expressions
Preview 17:25
Let's take a look at the important topic of writing text files. After all, perl is great for creating text files, whether you want to record what's going on, scrape stuff from the Internet or just reformat existing text files. We'll also take a look at how we can basically do a "find and replace" with a simple perl regex (regular expression) command.
Writing Files and Replacing Text
Preview 20:17
The "." wildcard in Perl is the most useful wildcard and can stand for any letter or symbol. Even if you only learn this one regular expression special character, you'll be able to do a whole lot more than if you didn't know it.
Wildcards in Regular Expressions
Preview 06:06
Groups are just a way of finding out what your regular expression wildcards actually matched. Which can be very handy.
Groups: Finding Out What You Actually Matched
Preview 06:58
Quantifiers enable you to say how many of a given character or wildcard you want to match. They can either match as much as possible, or just enough to gel with the rest of your regular expression.
Quantifiers: Greedy vs. Non-Greedy
Preview 10:09
Escape sequences let you match particular special characters or entire classes of characters, like all numbers or all alphanumeric characters and so on.
Escape Sequences
Preview 14:42
Numeric quantifiers let you specify exactly how many of a given character or sequence you want to match. You can even specify a range.
Numeric Quantifiers
Preview 09:26
It's time for a test of your regex and Perl knowledge. Watch out -- there's a trick question near the end. It's so tricky, I even tricked myself.
Test Your Perl and Regex Knowlege - First Test
Preview 25:02
+ – More on Reading Files Line By Line: Tips, Tricks and Vital Knowledge
12 lectures 02:39:30
The split function lets you split a string on some delimiter into an array of strings, which is just incredibly useful for reading stuff like comma or tab separated files.
Split and Reading CSV Files
10:51
The opposite of "split" is "join"; joining strings in an array together in one line. This is handy for creating SQL statements and also for debugging arrays; but even handier for debugging is the Data::Dumper, which can display any data structure, no matter how complex.
Join and Viewing Data Using Data::Dumper
07:21
We need to deal with the new line at the end of every line; get rid of it somehow. And how about the spaces which are all too often found hanging around commas in CSV files? Fortunately there's an easy answer to all this.
Chomp and Removing Spaces in Splits
09:28
Using the important "push" subroutine to add data to arrays.
"Pushing" Onto Arrays
07:37
We can create "multidimensional" array in Perl -- arrays where you need more than one index or "dimension" to specify the location of an element. This will help us a lot if we want to store data from a spreadsheet or CSV file for example.
Arrays of Arrays
16:14
Hashes are the other complex data type in Perl, along with arrays. They are basically lookup tables or "maps", and are unbelievably useful.
Hashes: Lookup Tables in Perl
16:22
How to iterate over hashes.
Iterating Over Hashes
12:48
Arrays of hashes might sound like going a bit far, but it'll enable us to build up very powerful and useful data structures.
Arrays of Hashes
08:01
We can use an array of hashes to hold CSV data (or any kind of database data) in a very convenient manner.
Storing CSV Data in a Data Structure
12:37

 It's easy and useful to put in a few checks to make sure your CSV data is in order.

Validating CSV Data
11:32
Perl makes it very easy to clean up bad data; in fact, it's one of the things that Perl is best at.
Cleaning CSV Data
17:37
Test your knowledge so far with this little challenge ....
Test Your Perl and Regex Knowlege - Second Test
29:02
+ – Web Scraping and More Regular Expressions
4 lectures 57:00
Web scraping "by hand" - using regular expressions - is a great way to improve your Perl and learn a few useful tricks. So let's take a look at how to write a web scraper!
Basic Web Scraping
12:36
Character classes enable you to specify sets of characters that can be matched, or not matched. They're extremely useful.
Character Classes
17:21

Often you want to apply a regular expression repeatedly to the same text; for instance, to extract all images from an HTML page. There are several ways to do this; we'll look at a memory-efficient way here. Note: I've changed my website since this lecture, so where I talk about matching stuff on my site, that's no longer relevant. You can try matching something else on my site or some other site though; the stuff in the video is just an example.

Matching Repeatedly
17:07
If you're working with small text documents, you can collect all your matches altogether at once. This involves using a match expression in an array context; something not possible in many languages, but possible in Perl.
Collecting Repeated Matches All At Once
09:56
+ – Building a Complete Progam: Command Line Options
6 lectures 01:10:21
Often you'll want the end user (even if it's you) to be able to run your Perl script with various options. Let's look at how to retrieve options that are specified on the command line.
Getting Command Line Options
14:14
We've already seen an example of a subroutine in Perl; the "main" subroutine that I like to define in my programs (although it's not obligatory, and doesn't have to be called "main" either). Let's look at defining subroutines in general, and returning values from them.
Subroutines and Returning Values
06:46
How to create multi-line strings and comments in Perl. Alas, this is a bit cumbersome -- at least in Perl 5.*, which we're looking at here. But you can do it, and it's very useful.

Multi-Line Strings and Comments
11:30
Passing subroutine arguments works a bit differently in Perl to other languages. Last time I looked, the official Perl documentation said that it was "simplicity itself" (if I remember correctly). This is an overstatement, unless you think that differential calculus is also simplicity itself. However, once you get your head around it, it's really OK. Hopefully this tutorial will help.
Passing Arguments to Subroutines
11:39
We've already seen references to hashes briefly, but it's worth going over them again. It's much easier and more efficient to pass a reference to a hash to a subroutine than the actual hash itself, in the same way that it's easier to give someone your address than to physically take them there.
References to Hashes
12:33
Finally, for this section, we can now look at checking values in hashes. This will enable us to check the command line options we got earlier.
Checking Values in Hashes
13:39
+ – Parsing XML and Complex Data Structures
6 lectures 01:44:49
Perl's great for working with files, and makes it easy to list all the files in a directory.
Finding All Files in a Directory and Filtering Arrays
20:34
No new Perl concepts in this tutorial, but we'll look at putting some structure in place to process files one at a time.
Processing Files One By One
10:55
In this tutorial we'll look at how to parse XML using regular expression alone; this is a really good technique for working with massive files or what you just want to pick a few bits out of your XML and don't want to use a heavyweight parser.
Parsing XML with Regular Expressions
22:27
In this tutorial we'll look at the XML::Simple parser module and how to extract data from the resulting complex document object model.
Using XML::Simple, and Extracting Data from Complex Structures
18:16
In this tutorial we'll get the remaining data out of the complex data structure that resulted from parsing our XML. I highly recommend having a go at this yourself after watching the video, or even better, before! Or just enjoy the video --- but remember that you'll need to practise this stuff to be able to use it.
Extracting Data from Complex Structures: A Complete Example
18:11
We've been extracting stuff from complex data structures, but now let's look at the reverse; building up complex data structures from scratch.
Building Complex Data Structures
14:26
+ – Working with Databases
8 lectures 01:27:45
A review of three of the world's most popular databases that you can use with Perl --- all of which come in free versions, and two of which are basically totally free.
Free Databases to Use with Perl
09:19
Let's create a database to hold our data using the free MySQL Workbench too.
Creating Databases with MySQL
18:07
Perl makes working with databases a joy, most of the time. In this tutorial we'll look at how to connect to a database.
Connecting to a Database
10:04
Now we can insert some data into our database using standard SQL. If you don't know SQL and want to learn, there are lots of free tutorials about and SQL is not as hard to learn as a programming language (not by a long chalk!) so don't panic.
Inserting Data into a Database
12:40
We can issue simple SQL commands using the "do" method (a "method" is a subroutine that's part of an "object" -- the database handle object in this case). We'll use it here to clear the database before importing data into it.
Deleting Data and Executing Dataless SQL Commands
03:33
If you insert a database row with an auto-increment ID, you'll need to get the ID of that row before you can then insert data that references that row. Fortunately Perl makes it easy.
Getting the IDs of Records You've Just Inserted
15:02
Perl makes it very easy to run SQL queries. Let's take a look.
Querying Databases
12:29
This is just a quick reminder that you can easily print data to a file in any format you desire. I was going to get into join(), but then realised it was kind of superfluous here (unless we switch to using fetchrow_arrayref).
Exporting Data
06:31
+ – Perl One-Liners
3 lectures 27:26
Perl allows you to run small one-line programs directly on a terminal or console. It turns out to be quite surprising how much you can actually get done with one line of Perl, if you miss out the bells and whistles and condense it a bit.
Running One-Line Perl Programs
07:22
Perl allows us to easily read a file, loop through it and print each line, just by giving an extra option on the command line. This allows us to efficiently construct programs that, for example, replace text in a file.
Replacing Text in Files
11:25
We can use a one-liner to search for and replace text in a whole bunch of files, editing the actual files and making backups of the originals. All in one line!
Editing Files In-Place
08:39
+ – Modules and OO Perl
4 lectures 01:02:20
Modules allow you to organise your Perl code, packaging subroutines that belong together into reusable units.
Modules
20:07
Perl modules can be placed in a directory structure, allowing you to organise them hierarchically (much like Java, for instance).
Packages and Directories
13:15
A short introduction to OO programming. If you already understand object-oriented programming, you can skip this video. Stay tuned if you don't know what it is. This is just a little introduction to objects and classes and why we need them. No perl code here; we'll look at that in the next tutorial.
Object Orientation: A Brief Introduction
08:14
Now we turn to implementing classes and objects in Perl. These techniques can really help simplify and organise your programs.
Implementing OO in Perl
20:44
+ – Web Application Basics
5 lectures 59:34
The Apache HTTP server is the world's most popular web server, and you can run it even on most laptops. Here we'll look at how to install it and configure it for use with Perl "CGI" scripts.
Installing the Apache HTTP Server
12:17

The simplest possible CGI web app just consists of a program that prints a content header followed by some text. We'll create such a program in this tutorial.

A Hello World Web App
10:27

The CGI.pm module simplifies a lot of web-related tasks that would otherwise be tricky. Some parts of it are of dubious value, but others are definitely extremely helpful.

The CGI.pm Module
08:55
It's common to add parameters (name-value pairs) into a URL, which can then be used to output different stuff from your Perl web application. Here I'll show you how to get parameter values from the URL.
Using URL Parameters
07:39
Let's finish this little introduction to Perl web apps with a look at processing HTML forms -- the basis of website interactivity.
Website Forms
20:16
+ – Basic Sysadmin Tasks
2 lectures 18:38
Perl provides standard modules for many common tasks, including copy and moving files, as well as the built-in "unlike" function for deleting files.
Moving, Copying and Deleting Files
09:44
Perl makes it easy to execute console commands on your operating system and to get whatever output is returned from those commands.
Executing System Commands
08:54
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.

Who this course is for:
  • Anyone who has some familiarity with basic programming in any language
  • Anyone who wants to learn how to automate common tasks in IT
Featured review
Dr. Hussein Bakri
Dr. Hussein Bakri ( 2688 courses, 98 reviews )
a year ago
What a lovely course on Perl. Amazing style of teaching and very good material. You learn a lot through examples which are very useful. Few problems: The resolution of videos could be improved. This course is not suitable for mobile devices (the font is too small)