Learning Perl, Fourth Edition

Appendix B. Beyond the Llama

We’ve covered a lot in this book, but there’s more. In this appendix, we’ll explain a little more about what Perl can do, and give some references on where to learn the details. Some of what we mention here is on the bleeding edge and may have changed by the time you’re reading this book, which is one reason why we frequently send you to the documentation for the full story. We don’t expect many readers to read every word of this appendix, but we hope you’ll at least skim the headings so that you’ll be prepared to fight back when someone tells you, “You just can’t use Perl for project X because Perl can’t do Y.”

So as not to repeat ourselves in every paragraph: the important part of what we don’t cover here is covered in the Alpaca. Read the Alpaca, especially if you’ll be writing programs that are longer than 100 lines (alone or with other people). Especially if you’re tired of hearing about Fred and Barney, and you want to move on to another fictional universe featuring seven people^[376] who got to spend a lot of time on an isolated island after a cruise!

Further Documentation

The documentation that comes with Perl may seem overwhelming at first. Fortunately, you can use your computer to search for keywords in the documentation. When searching for a particular topic, it’s often good to start with the perltoc (table of contents) and perlfaq (frequently asked questions) sections. On most systems, the perldoc command should be able to track down the documentation ...