Day 20. Odds and Ends

As this book draws to a close, you've now learned, or at least explored, the bulk of the Perl language as it exists today. But, as with every individual subject in Perl, there are other things to do and other ways to do them that I have not explored in this book.

This lesson, then, is the “Going Deeper” for the whole book. In this lesson we'll look at a number of topics that are either too complex or too tangential to have been explored earlier. Those topics include the following:

• One-liner scripts called on the Perl command line

• An introduction to object-oriented programming in Perl

• Sockets and simple networking

• POD Files (Plain Old Documentation)

• Evaluating code on-the-fly

• International Perl scripts

• Checking for security holes with Perl's “taint mode”

• Using PerlScript on Windows

• What's coming up in Perl 6