Many programmers would love to use Perl for projects that involve heavy lifting, but miss the many traditional algorithms that textbooks teach for other languages. Computer scientists have identified many techniques that a wide range of programs need, such as:
Fuzzy pattern matching for text (identify misspellings!)
Finding correlations in data
Game-playing algorithms
Predicting phenomena such as Web traffic
Polynomial and spline fitting
Using algorithms explained in this book, you too can carry out traditional programming tasks in a high-powered, efficient, easy-to-maintain manner with Perl. This book assumes a basic understanding of Perl syntax and functions, but not necessarily any background in computer science. The authors explain in a readable fashion the reasons for using various classic programming techniques, the kind of applications that use them, and — most important — how to code these algorithms in Perl. If you are an amateur programmer, this book will fill you in on the essential algorithms you need to solve problems like an expert. If you have already learned algorithms in other languages, you will be surprised at how much different (and often easier) it is to implement them in Perl. And yes, the book even has the obligatory fractal display program. There have been dozens of books on programming algorithms, some of them excellent, but never before has there been one that uses Perl.
The authors include the editor of
The Perl Journal
and master librarian of CPAN; all are contributors to CPAN and have archived much of the code in this book there.
"This book was so exciting I lost sleep reading it." Tom Christiansen