Resources

Perl

• The NCSA Perl Tutorial. This tutorial is quite old, i.e., it is not about Perl 5, but has the basics.
• The perl man pages:
  • man perl has the list of topics, including the following:
  • man perlre is all about regular expressions.
  • man perlsyn describes the basic syntax (loops, etc.)
  • man perldata explains data types and variables.
  • man perlvar lists special/predefined variables.
  • man perlop details operators (including the match operator)
  • man perlsub covers subroutines
  • man perlref has more than you need on references
  • man perlrun gives all the switches Perl accepts
• Some chapters from the Effective Perl Programming book are available online.
• www.perl.com has the latest news about Perl and quite a bunch of documentation, though not necessarily well organized.

Note: The perl man pages are authoritative. Whenever you are in doubt about something (and don't want to test it yourself), look at the man pages. Also use the man pages to figure out if the Perl on dc has some cool language feature you read in a book. The man pages are not really the easiest way to learn Perl.

Java

• The Java Tutorial. In particular, look at the following trails: Learning the Java Language, Essential Java Classes (ignore Threads for the time being). If you have trouble running a basic example, look at Your first cup of Java (for UNIX), . Also look at the Collections trail for STL-like data structure classes.
• Java for C++ Programmers
• The language specification is published as a book. It is also available online.
• The standard Java classes (API) available in JDK 1.2.2.
• The Java FAQ. In particular, look at the sections answering language issues (#6), I/O (#7), and the core library (#8).

Alan Sussman's 330 Lecture Slides

Some of the lectures were based on Alan Sussman's slides from Fall 2000. Find them here.

Old 330 Recitations

During the fall and spring semesters, CMSC 330 students enjoy more detailed language presentations during recitations. The material I used in the fall of 2000 is available here.