[Mastering-perl] The first two chapters

[brian d foy]

I had a lot of excitement about starting this book then got bogged
down in recovering from the holidays and buying a condo. Woe is me.

The next big thing is the February 15th deadline for the first two
chapters. I had hoped to have completed those over the holiday, but as
usual my plans were too ambitious.

I'm actually working on three chapters right now:

* Tie - the first edition of Advanced Perl Programming covered this
and it's a good place to start I think . I don't care so much about
doing incredibly fancy things, but re-implementing arrays can be quite
an education. Ever look at the full perldoc listing for splice? Quick,
without looking, does splice do if the offset and length are both
negative? That has to be useful for some sort of obfuscated Perl
contest. I eventually backed off my example module and just wrote test
code for splice working on a normal array.  In the repository, this is
at Chapters/tied_variables.pod


* Benchmarking - When I started this chapter, I thought it would be
mostly about Benchmark.pm and a little about timing. As I started
thinking about it, though, timing is just one thing that you can
benchmark. I want to add a lot on looking at memory use too. Other
things, like network performance, disk activity, or whatever is
probably best measured with things other than Perl istself, so I have
to cover those.  In the repository, this is at
Chapters/benchmarking.pod


* Advanced Regular Expressions - In the old Stonehenge Intermediate
Perl course, we covered a lot of other regex things, but those
disappeared somewhere around 2002, I think. I want to bring some of
them back. Right now I'm just making a list of things I want to cover.
Suggestions, anyone? In the repository, this is at
Chapters/advanced_regular_expressions.pod


The repository info is at
http://www252.pair.com/comdog/mastering_perl/source_control.html

--
brian d foy <brian.d.foy at gmail.com>
http://www.pair.com/~comdog