Hashes & Arrays

1-1.5 day course

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" Hashes & Arrays " 1 days
Next Public Offering: TBD; Help Us Schedule!

" Hashes & Arrays " 1.5 days
Next Public Offering: TBD; Help Us Schedule!

Course Description

Perl's "hash" data structure is one of the most important and useful features of the language, so Perl programmers need to understand how to create, access, and use hashes productively. Arrays are similar to hashes but characterized by complementary advantages and disadvantages, so programmers need to know when to use them instead of hashes.

These courses start with a review of the basics of Hashes and Arrays (covered in Perl Programming), and then focus on the more advanced tools and techniques that are commonly used in industrial-grade programs.

The language features that are covered in both courses include push, pop, shift, unshift, splice, exists, delete, keys, values, each, tie, slices, autovivification, data persistence, and relevant Perl modules.

Sample programming examples include: finding unique elements in a list, calculating word frequencies from web pages, initializing arrays from pattern matches, picking a random element from an array, showing elements common to two arrays, splicing one list into another, imposing constraints on hash keys, using hashes for "unique-ification", etc.

The 1-Day Course

This course focuses on the productive use of simple arrays and hashes, featuring lots of programming examples and ample hands-on time for students to try the techniques in their own programs.

The level of the course is between Beginner and Intermediate. The goal is to show cool things that can be done with hashes and arrays, without getting mired in the complexities of complex data structures and dereferencing.

The 1.5-Day Course

The longer course adds an additional half-day to cover techniques for building complex data structures with arrays and hashes, based on the use of nested data structures and references. (For those desiring a more detailed treatment of these topics, in a 3-day course, we also offer Intermediate Perl Programming.)

The level of the longer course is initially Beginner, but progresses into Intermediate on the last half-day.

Who Should Attend

Beginning to Intermediate Perl programmers who have mastered most of the fundamentals of Perl, but who need to learn more about using Arrays and Hashes effectively.

Prerequisites

Students should have at least 6 months of prior experience with UNIX and Perl, and be familiar with Perl's matching, substitution, split, and my operators, scalar, array, and hash variables, subroutines and loops, and the use of (non-OO) Perl modules. Students must be experienced with one of the following text editors: vi, emacs, or pico (or some other locally available editor, for on-site classes). The course is intended for programmers, system administrators, network administrators, data administrators, webmasters, and others who need to improve their Perl programming skills.

Author & Instructors

Dr. Tim Maher has been working with the interpreted languages of UNIX for over 20 years. He has used them to write many sophisticated applications, including a user interface for U.C. Berkeley undergraduates and source code beautifiers for Perl and C++. As the founder and head of CONSULTIX, Tim regularly teaches courses on a wide variety of software topics.

CONSULTIX instructors are renowned for their ability to communicate complex concepts in simple terms and to make the study of dry technical material enjoyable.

Topics

Both Courses

*List Generators*	*List Processors*	*List Initialization*
*List Functions*	*Array Functions*	*Hash Functions*
*Slices*	*Auto-Vivification*	*Unique-ifiers*
*Hash::Util*	*List::Util*	*Tied Hashes*

Longer Course Only

*Array References*	*Hash References*
*Multi-Dimensional Arrays*	*Multi-Dimensional Hashes*
*Anonymous Arrays*	*Anonymous Hashes*