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 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.
Performance - making Perl run fast on pperl: measuring with the right tools, which classic idioms still pay off, and how to shape a loop so the JIT and parallelizer take it.
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.
Tying Variables - making a variable dispatch through a class: tied scalars, arrays, hashes, and filehandles, with a complete worked class for each.
Coming from another language - Perl by analogy for developers fluent in another language: each construct you already know mapped to its Perl counterpart, with the gotcha the similarity hides. Python first; PHP, Ruby, Lua planned.
Graphics - two-dimensional graphics in Perl, from the pixel up: the drawing algorithms, the CPAN toolkits (Imager, Cairo, Prima), reaching C libraries through pperl’s native FFI, and two runnable capstones (a drawing app and a 2D game).
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.
Interprocess Communication - runnable IPC cookbook: subprocesses, FIFOs, TCP and UDP sockets, socket pairs, System V semaphores and shared memory.