Xah's Perl ＆ Python Tutorial

Xah Lee, 2005, …, 2013

This is a tutorial on Perl ＆ Python. The tutorial is concrete, practical, with a lot short example code that runs. It explains things as they function.

The Python code examples given here are tested with version 2.6 and later. The Perl is v5.8.1 (released 2003-09) and later.

As of 2012-12-16, am adding Ruby to these pages.

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Language Basics

Language in a glance.

• Python Basics, Python 3 Basics
• Ruby Basics
• Perl Basics
• PHP Basics
• JavaScript Basics
• Emacs Lisp Basics
• OCaml Basics
• Linux: Most Frequently Used Shell Commands
• Java Basics

Functions, Objects, Modules

• Loading and Using a Module
• defining a function
• classes and objects
• writing a module

Files

• reading and writing to a file
• Traverse a directory

Regex

• Perl ＆ Python: Regex Example
• Python ＆ Perl: Splitting a Line by Regex

Sort

• Python: Sort List, Matrix, Object
• Perl: Sort List, Matrix, Object

Bundled help system

Advanced, Specific, Tasks

• Perl: General Function for Sorting Matrix
• Python ＆ Perl: Sort Matrix, Object, Math of Sorting

• Python: Function with State (closure)
• Python: What's the Difference Between Tuple and List?
• How to Copy a Nested List in Python?
• Python: a Technique to Append String in a Loop
• Python's Reference and Internal Model of Computing Languages

Unicode

• Python ＆ Perl: Converting a File's Encoding
• Python's unicodedata Module

Web

• sending email
• get a web page content

• A Script to check HTML file size
• Thumbnail Generation

Unix Sys Admin

• gzip files
• system calls
• Split File Fullpath into Parts

Functional Programing Exercises

• combinatorics fun
• list comprehension
• combinatorics fun: pairings reduce
• partition by equivalence
• generic partition by equivalence predicate
• generate all possible pairings
• delete duplicate files
• Python ＆ Perl: One-Liner Loop Functional Style

Python Documentation Problems

Misc

• Python: get Python Path, Script Path
• Python Tech 2012
• Perl Books Survey 2002
• Parse JSON in PHP ＆ Python
• Perl Sort Unstable
• Lambda in Python 3000
• Python Regex Documentation: String Pattern Matching

About The Author. Thanks to members of comp.lang.perl.misc and comp.lang.python for comments and corrections.

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