Sarat1729 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks,

I am interested in learning Perl on my own, not just the syntax to make my work done, but want to understand what happens behind the scenes as well. Please suggest where I can start for that to understand every minute internal details.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Self study Perl
by Corion (Patriarch) on Sep 07, 2017 at 10:41 UTC

    Depending on your level of understanding Perl, maybe the illustrated internal Perl data structures are interesting to you. But that requires a working knowledge of C.

    If you are starting out with Perl but already know how to program, Modern Perl and Higher Order Perl are two high-quality introductions to Perl that will provide you with the background why Perl needs the datastructures that it uses.

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Re: Self study Perl
by Discipulus (Canon) on Sep 07, 2017 at 10:33 UTC
    Hello Sarat1729,

    I think you'll find the thread Why learn Perl? interesting. Many more are already present at perlmonks: Super Search them!

    I also have more links about it at my homenode

    L*

    There are no rules, there are no thumbs..
    Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.
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Re: Self study Perl
by 1nickt (Canon) on Sep 07, 2017 at 14:00 UTC

    Hi, see the official Perl documentation on the subject: perlguts.

    (Or run the command perldoc perlguts where your perl is installed.)


    The way forward always starts with a minimal test.
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Re: Self study Perl
by kcott (Archbishop) on Sep 08, 2017 at 00:24 UTC
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Re: Self study Perl
by stall (Novice) on Sep 08, 2017 at 11:55 UTC

    It may be a bit dated but the Perl Cookbook is a very good resource.

    Here is a fairly up to date OO guide
    http://perldoc.perl.org/perlootut.html

    It is still good to know the old school way of Perl OO.
    http://perldoc.perl.org/perlobj.html

    Pretty much everything here
    http://perldoc.perl.org/index-language.html
    and here
    http://perldoc.perl.org/index-tutorials.html
    is the most up to date information on programming in Perl.

    This may not be the internals of the C code that Perl is built with, but it is the internals of how Perl is built and how the syntax works together with the design of the Perl language.

    Finally, don't go crazy trying to fit everything into a bloated OO design. Composition is often preferred over inheritance. Work on the basics before worring too much about the finer points. Perl to a large extent is about breaking things into modules and trying to use built-in functionality to manipulate data in chunks, rather than byte by byte as one would do in C or C++. Perl Programmers spend a lot of time figuring out how not to use for loops. And they have a particular love of hashes, regular expressions and the sort function.

    The true "A" team Perl shops I've worked in, Modern Perl and Higher-Order Perl were the books that formed the basis of our design style. I rate Modern Perl the more important of the two.

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Re: Self study Perl
by karlgoethebier (Abbot) on Sep 08, 2017 at 10:32 UTC
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