Chapter 17. Some Advanced Perl Techniques

Chapter 17. Some Advanced Perl Techniques

What we've put in the rest of this book is the core of Perl, the part that every Perl user should understand. But there are a few other techniques that, while not obligatory, are still valuable tools to have in your toolbox. We've gathered the most important of those for this chapter.

Don't be misled by the title of the chapter, though; the techniques here aren't especially more difficult to understand than what we have elsewhere. They are "advanced" merely in the sense that they aren't necessary for beginners. The first time you read this book, you may want to skip (or skim) this chapter so you can get right to using Perl. Come back to it a month or two later, when you're ready to get even more out of Perl. Consider this entire chapter a huge footnote^[1].

^[1] We contemplated doing that in one of the drafts, but got firmly rejected by O'Reilly's editors.