Array of Light

If you're like most Perl developers, you probably use arrays extensively in your development activities, as a convenient way to store related data values together. However, if you're like most developers, it's also quite likely that your knowledge of array manipulation techniques is limited to counting the elements of an array or iterating through key-value pairs. Although it might seem like sufficient for daily use, this limited knowledge can actually hamper your efficiency, by forcing you to write lines of code to perform tasks that could be handled more effectively through a built-in array function - all because you didn't know better!

Well, it's time to bring you into the light.

Over the course of this tutorial, I'll be examining Perl's arrays in detail, explaining what they are, how they work, and how you can use them to get things done faster, better and cheaper. In addition to providing a gentle introduction to Perl arrays and hashes in general, this article will also offer you a broad overview of Perl's array manipulation functions, providing you with a handy reference that should help you write more efficient code.