The Exercises
These exercises are intended to help you consolidate what you have
read, and to get you writing Perl scripts. They are arranged by
chapter, so that an exercise given under Chapter x should only need
information provided in Chapters 1 to x, unless the exercise
requires you to do some extra research, in which case the necessary
pointers are provided. Questions marked with a § sign are
simple drill exercises and should not take you more than a few
minutes; those marked with an asterisk (*) are substantial
programming projects, which you might prefer to omit if you have
projects of your own to work on. The unmarked exercises lie in
between: they all require some thought and, usually, the writing of a
Perl script. They vary in difficulty but, in general, as the material
covered in the book gets more complex towards the end, so too do the
exercises. (If some of the exercises appear to be marked with the string
, it's time you upgraded your Web browser.)
I have provided some test data for a few of
the exercises, and also some hints and a few
solutions in case you are totally stuck,
but, please remember that
there are no best answers to these exercises; if you are happy with
something, and it works, that's fine. If you can, you should
experiment with different solutions, to get a feel for how you like to
use Perl. Be ambitious, do more than you think you can. Be daring,
push the language to its limits if you need to. But try to have some
sort of fun.
Work through the exercises by chapter,
or go straight to:
Alternatively, download the exercises as they appear in the book
in PostScript
(545Kbytes) or PDF (Acrobat) (154Kbytes).
Perl: The Programmer's Companion