Perl 5.10 added more useful features to the language than any other release since Perl 5.0.0. However, many people are now using Perl 5.10, without taking advantage of those new features.
Perl 5.12, 5.14, and 5.16 are more recent releases of Perl and provide important refinements and enhancements to the extra functionality introduced in Perl 5.10. Perl 5.12 was released in early 2010, Perl 5.14 a year later, and Perl 5.16 became the current stable release in May 2012.
This one-day tutorial provides a detailed introduction to the new and improved features of these four modern versions of Perl 5, along with practical examples of how they can improve the performance, robustness, and maintainability of your code.
Topics covered include:
- Backward and forward compatibility using the feature pragma
- Smartmatching comparisons
- Perl's new switch statement
- Many new features within regular expressions
- State variables
- Handling defaults with the defined-or operator
- New and improved file and filetest operations
- Recursive sorting and pattern matching
- The new UNITCHECK execution phase
- The extended package definition syntax
- Implicit strictures
- Using each on arrays
- Using array or hash references in place of arrays or hashes
- Much more reliable exception handling
- New and improved core modules and pragmas
- New documentation
- Deprecations and feature removals
- Where to expect better (or worse!) performance
1 day seminar
Perl programmers of all skill and experience levels will benefit from this class.