Perl 6 Fundamentals: A Primer with Examples, Projects, and Case Studies

Gain the skills to begin developing Perl 6 applications from the ground up in this hands-on compact book, which includes a foreword from Larry Wall, creator of Perl. You’ll learn enough to get started building with Perl 6, using Perl 6’s gradual typing, handy object orientation features, powerful parsing capabilities, and human-usable concurrency. After a short introduction, each chapter develops a small example project, explaining the Perl 6 features used. When the example is done, you’ll explore another aspect, such as optimizing further for readability or testing the code.

Along the way you’ll see Perl 6 basics, such as variables and scoping; subroutines; classes and objects; regexes; and code testing. When you’ve mastered the basics, Perl 6 Fundamentals moves onto more advanced topics to give you a deeper understanding of the language. You’ll learn, amongst other things, how to work with persistent storage, how to generate good error messages, and how to write tricky applications such as a file and directory usage graph and a Unicode search tool.

What You’ll Learn

• Get coding with Perl 6
• Work on several hands-on examples and projects
• Integrate Python libraries into your Perl 6 programs
• Parse INI files using regexes and grammars
• Build a date time converter
• Carry out refactoring and other automated tests

Who This Book Is For

If you already know one or more programming languages, and want to learn about Perl 6, this book is for you.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: What Is Perl 6?
Chapter 2: Running Rakudo Perl 6
Chapter 3: Formatting a Sudoku Puzzle
Chapter 4: Datetime Conversion for the Command Line
Chapter 5: Testing say()
Chapter 6: Silent-Cron, a Cron Wrapper
Chapter 7: Stateful Silent-Cron
Chapter 8: Review of the Perl 6 Basics
Chapter 9: Parsing INI Files Using Regexes and Grammars
Chapter 10: A File and Directory Usage Graph
Chapter 11: A Unicode Search Tool
Chapter 12: Plotting Using Inline::Python and Matplotlib
Chapter 13: What’s Next?