One thing Perl does really well is read in information from a file. There are a couple of useful special variables you can use to neaten up your code when doing this or to alter the default behavior when reading in records.

awk supports user defined variables as well as variables that are predefined. These variables do not need to be declared like they do in bash scripts. There are three types of variables.

"If Perl 6 is a little daunting, take a smaller bite by reading one of Adriano Ferreira's Perl 6 microarticles. The index of articles is on the official Perl 6 wiki on the page called Perl 6 microarticles. As of now the list of articles is..."

"I have always been unhappy reading source code on the Internet and on slides. The colors are never quite right. It seems like every Perl to HTML converter in existence gets it wrong (my blog is no exception).

"...Perl 6 has types. Everything is an Object in some way, and has a type. Variables can have type constraints, but they don't need to have one..."

"Perl 5.10 will be out soon — within a week — and pumpking Rafael Garcia-Suarez will likely release a final release candidate for final testing and polishing. If you have Perl code you care about, it’s worth downloading RC3 to see how well things run with the new version..."

Aliases are great for saving typing time, and you probably already have a handful set up. But you may not be aware that it's possible to set up aliases that take command line variables as an argument. Read on for an example.

Experimenting with the Perl flip-flop operator (see under "Counting Variables"), I hit what looked like an oddity.

Higher-Order Perl is about functional programming techniques in Perl. It's about how to write functions that can modify and manufacture other functions. That way your code is more flexible and more reusable.