Today is the tying-up-the-loose-ends day. Today we looked at a number of extra features in Perl, the stuff that wasn't discussed in the previous 19 lessons of this book. It's a bit of a hodgepodge of stuff, including
Perl one-liners, simple scripts that can be run directly from a command line to accomplish basic tasks without having to create a whole script
Object-oriented programming in Perl—a combination of references, packages, modules, and subroutines, and some extra stuff to pull it all together
An overview of network socket programming in Perl
POD files, Perl's simple method for creating embedded documentation that can be formatted in various other ways (HTML, text, and so on)
Building and evaluating code on-the-fly with eval
Internationalization and localization with the locale module
Checking for tainted data to prevent security bugs and holes in your scripts
Using the PerlScript engine on Windows to incorporate Perl scripts into HTML Web pages or as a replacement for DOS and Windows batch files
Congratulations! We've only got one day left, and that one's full of examples. You've now learned enough of Perl to get quite a lot of exciting things done. Go to it! And don't forget—Perl is a collaborative effort. Make use of the modules in the CPAN, and if you write something that you think others might find useful, consider submitting it to the CPAN yourself.