When I happened to browse the Internet on AJAX, I came across a knowledge treasure on Ajax technology. Brett McLaughlin, O’ Reilly Media Inc, has come up with a series of articles on “Mastering Ajax”.

Part 1 of the series gives unambiguous explanation on the rudiments of AJAX technology.
Part 2 of this series introduces you to […]

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Since so many of the search engine queries that lead readers to this site have to do with manipulating the columns in a text data file, it’s probably worthwhile discussing column manipulation. Given that there’s actually quite a few scenarios, I’ll have to spread the discussion out over several postings (and unfortunately, several months).

Back in […]

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Dr. Robert Kline, of West Chester University, has created a very handy two-column, single-page comparison of Perl and PHP, ideal for those of you that need to convert some code. Not only does he give you simple coding examples for both languages, he also shows how to use mySQL in both languages.

Nice work, Dr. Kline. […]

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As I’ve said at CodeProfessor, a promising new web metrics + analytics package is being released by the guys at Performancing. As the package has an API, to be released shortly, I have plans to write some blog plugins, with a collaborator, for hardcore blog traffic analysis.

The statistical techniques I plan to use are rather […]

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This tutorial is based on the last one. We read in a file and print out each line of data with a line number. However, this time, if a line is blank or contains only white space, we remove it. To show that the script works, the line numbering in the output will match that […]

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This tutorial is a variation of the last one. As before, we read in lines of a data file and print them out with line numbers. The difference is that in this version, we specify the filename in the commandline parameters instead of redirecting standard input. (Feel free to compare the output of this script […]

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Reading all the lines of a data file is a very basic operation. Perl lets you do this in a number of ways. The method of feeding the data file to the Perl program can either be a redirect from the command line, or through a specified filename:

> perl readfile.pl < inputfile.txt
> perl readfile.pl inputfile.txt

This […]

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One of the strengths of Perl is that data types are very loose, and can change form. Thus programming variables can hold more than one type and shape of data, including numbers or strings. If you write prototype code to test out ideas, you can often temporarily assume that your input data is of the […]

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Most Perl books start with a “Hello, World” tutorial. That’s probably the simplest example to start with for most programming languages. But finding out how many parameters are in the commandline to a Perl script is also simple, and very important to most of the tutorials on this site.

I should note beforehand that some Perl […]

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A very common Perl tenet is that there is always more than one way to perform the same functionality. I won’t necessarily provide you the most efficient way, just the easiest to understand and/or explain. I could write entirely cryptic but tiny code snippets, but if I can’t explain it, or you can’t understand it, […]

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