Mastering Algorithms with Perl: Practical Programming Through Computer Science

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

John Macdonald has been using Perl commercially since 1988 for a suite of Unix system administration tools. His background with Unix dates back to the days when Unix was written in PDP-11 assembler and later includes representing the University of Waterloo at the first UNIX Users Meeting at City University of New York in the mid-1970s while finishing his M. Math degree. (In those days before the creation of Usenix, the people at the meeting would sit together around a single table.) In addition, his background includes work on compilers, kernel internals, device drivers and the like. He has also been observed partaking in recreational computing activities.

Jon Orwant, a well-known member of the Perl community, founded The Perl Journal and co-authored OReillys bestseller, Programming Perl, 3rd Edition.

Jarkko Hietaniemi is the creator and Master Librarian of CPAN: Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. He has also been known to frequent Perl developer forums. Luckily enough, getting his MSc in CS in the field of parallel computing didn't interfere overly much with his Perl and UNIX hacking. During those savored moments of off-line time, he fancies gobbling up speculative fiction and popular science. His real life employer is Nokia Research Center.