Summary

Today is the tying-up-the-loose-ends day. Today we looked at a number of extra features in Perl, the stuff that wasn't discussed in the previous 19 lessons of this book. It's a bit of a hodgepodge of stuff, including

• Perl one-liners, simple scripts that can be run directly from a command line to accomplish basic tasks without having to create a whole script

• Object-oriented programming in Perl—a combination of references, packages, modules, and subroutines, and some extra stuff to pull it all together

• An overview of network socket programming in Perl

• POD files, Perl's simple method for creating embedded documentation that can be formatted in various other ways (HTML, text, and so on)

• Building and evaluating code on-the-fly with eval

• Internationalization and localization with the locale module

• Checking for tainted data to prevent security bugs and holes in your scripts

• Using the PerlScript engine on Windows to incorporate Perl scripts into HTML Web pages or as a replacement for DOS and Windows batch files

Congratulations! We've only got one day left, and that one's full of examples. You've now learned enough of Perl to get quite a lot of exciting things done. Go to it! And don't forget—Perl is a collaborative effort. Make use of the modules in the CPAN, and if you write something that you think others might find useful, consider submitting it to the CPAN yourself.