Perl Maven

Perl tutorials and courses

Modern Perl Web Frameworks

  • Mojolicious light-weight web framework with rainbows and unicorns.
  • Perl Dancer light-weight web framework to rock.
  • Catalyst The MVC web framework of Perl.
  • PSGI/Plack, the low-level superglue between Perl web application frameworks and web servers.
  • CGI, the Common Gateway Interface, for old-school web applications.

Object Oriented Perl

  • OOP, the classic way to write Object Oriented Perl code.
  • Moo, the Minimalist Object Oriented system for Perl.
  • Moose, the 'post modern' Object Oriented system for Perl.

Other Series

Projects and Collections

Code-Maven series

If you are a beginner, or would like to refresh your Perl programming knowledge, you can go over the Perl tutorial or watch the Beginner Perl Maven video course.

If you need to maintain a large piece of software written in Perl by other people in the last 5-10-15 years, that's a challenge. Especially if you did not get proper training in Perl. You are probably limited to a specific and old version of Perl. Check out, the Perl tutorial! You can probably skip the part about installing Perl, but the rest of the tutorial will be relevant for you.

Perl is often used in Test Automation. If you work in this field, or if you'd like to work in this field (it is much more fun to find bugs in other people's code than in yours :), then you can read the Perl tutorial and the series on Test Automation using Perl.

If you build new web applications - either privately or inside a company - you can start by reading the article comparing CGI, mod_perl and PSGI. From there you can go on reading the generic Perl tutorial or the articles on Mojolicious, Perl Dancer, Catalyst, PSGI/Plack, or even CGI, the Common Gateway Interface, for old-school web applications.

Recent Articles

Memory use of sparse arrays in Perl

A few days ago, one of the Perl Maven readers asked me about indexing in arrays in Perl, and then he was wondering if arrays that only have elements in some high index are sparse arrays? In other words if we have an array with a single value at index 1,000,000 does Perl allocate space for all the preceding 1,000,000 elements, or is does it take up place for the single element in the array.

In yet other words, how much memory does this use? 

my @a;
$a[1_000_000] = 1;


Memory use of sparse arrays in Perl

Pro: How deep is a recursion in Perl?

We have discussed recursion in Perl and the problem with recursion that is too deep, but how can you find out the current depth of the recursion?


How deep is a recursion in Perl?

Pro: Deep recursion on subroutine

When calling a function in recursion we have to be careful to check the stop condition before we call the recursion. If not, we can end up with an infinite recursion that will end only when we have exhausted the resources of our computer.

In order to protect the user from never ending recursions, perl has a hard limit on the number of recursion and if you reach that limit you'll get a warning: Deep recursion on subroutine. The rather arbitrary limit is 100.

Let's see an example.


Deep recursion on subroutine