ctwayfarer’s Reviews > Beginning Perl > Status Update

The Unicode standard is a way to describe every character in every writing system with a single
number. This number is called a code point and it’s composed of one or more octets. We use the
word octet to refer to 8 bits, so all characters that can be represented by the numbers 0 to 255 take
up 1 octet of space.

Typeglobs and fileglobs are not the same thing.

Perl has a handy module named B::Deparse. The B::
modules are backend modules and let you see some things about Perl normally
not visible.

The Try::Tiny module provides a try/catch/finally system for Perl.

It’s strongly recommended that you use an explicit return on all but the simplest subroutines because in a complicated subroutine, explicit return statements clarify flow control.

Variable declaration happens at compile time before the code is run. However, variable
assignment happens at runtime

It’s far better to have your program die horribly than to return bad data.

You often see Perl programmers refer to array references as arefs.
Hash references are hrefs. Subroutines (Chapter 7) are subrefs or coderefs. Sometimes you can just say ref when you are talking about references in general.

In Perl, you tend to care more about how you organize your data than the kinds of data you have. As a result, Perl enables rich, complex data structures and imposes few limits on how you can organize your data. When you get used to the syntax, you may be pleasantly surprised. Memory management is handled for you; there is no pointer math to get wrong; and there are no external libraries to choose from and load.