How-To#
Two kinds of task-oriented material live in this section. The distinction matters because it tells you how much time to put aside and what you’ll walk away with.
Guides are long-form and multi-chapter. You read them the way
you read a book — cover to cover, or chapter by chapter with each
chapter building on the last. A guide covers a whole subject in
depth. The regex guide, for instance, takes you from m// through
Unicode properties and backtracking performance; the debugging guide
covers everything from attaching -d to decoding production stack
traces.
Tutorials are narrow and single-sitting. One tutorial, one topic, one specific question answered. You land on a tutorial with a task in mind and leave with it done. No larger arc, no required prior reading.
PPerl Architecture — how pperl is built: the dual runtime, the JIT, the FFI, native modules, and the concrete differences from upstream Perl 5.
Concurrent Execution — doing work in parallel: auto-parallelization, the ithreads reality, and how to choose between them.
Regular Expressions — Perl regex from first principles through performance tuning.
Object-oriented Programming — modern
class/field/method first, classical bless for maintainers,
migration paths.
Debugging — finding and fixing bugs:
the -d debugger, inspecting live state, production-path tools.
One-Liners — pperl at the shell:
-e, implicit loops, progressive recipes, parameterised aliases,
quoting gotchas.
Pack & Unpack — binary data layout: directives, endianness, network protocols, file formats.
Working with I/O Streams — the full
open story: modes, encoding layers, pipes, in-memory handles,
error handling.
Perl References — scalars, arrays, hashes, code, anonymous and weak references, nested structures.
Unicode in Perl — text vs bytes, source encoding, PerlIO layers, Unicode regex, common pitfalls.
Boolean Logic for Perl Programmers — truthiness, all sixteen binary operators, De Morgan, NAND/NOR completeness, bitwise and regex applications.