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

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