Basic Perl and CGI

This is the second in a three part series of courses on Perl and CGI:

• PERL101 - Introduction to Perl
• PERL102 - Basic Perl and CGI
• PERL103 - Perl, Forms, and CGI

This course covers the basics of the Perl programming language, with an introduction to the Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, that is the interface between a web server and code used to generate dynamic content. It assumes that PERL101 was taken as a prerequisite. This course reviews some of the concepts introducted in PERL101 and expands on them, as well as introducing more of the Perl language. The course outline is as follows:

• Introduction
• Variables
  • Scalar Variables
  • Arrays
  • Lists
  • Hashes
  • File Handles
  • Scope - my, our, local
  • Special Variables - $_,$/, etc..
• Printing
  • The print Function
  • The printf Function
• Strings
  • chomp and chop
  • length
  • sprintf
  • substr
  • Case - uc, lc, ucfirst, lcfirst
  • Character Substitution and Pattern Matching
    • =~
    • s/// - Substitution
    • m/// - Matching
    • tr/// - Transliteration
  • The split function
• File and directory related functions
  • Directory Functions
    • chdir
    • mkdir
    • rmdir
    • opendir
    • readdir
    • closedir
    • File Tests
  • File functions
    • open
    • eof
    • <>
    • close
    • unlink
    • rename
• Introduction to CGI
  • Before writing to a page...
  • Environment Variables
• Summary