Are there some up-to-date tutorials on Perl network programming?

Question

Are there links, materials, or books about network programming with Perl that are relevant to 2010? I saw some books on programming the network with Perl are very old (about a decade) and the tutorials on the internet are also old and using old modules.

Could someone provide a good reference about programming sockets and network layer/application layer protocols with Perl that are updated to 2010?

Answer 1

Although Lincoln Stein's Network Programming with Perl is a bit old, the content is still mostly good. Network programming at that level hasn't changed that much in the last couple of decades. If you want to learn to play with sockets, that's the book to get to get you started.

However, Perl at the socket level does that same thing the C libraries do. There might be some nice interfaces around it, but look under the interface and you'll see the same things.

Answer 2

This task really demands an asynchronous framework: pretty much everyone uses POE these days. I hate it because for me it doesn't look like Perl. It looks like its own special silly premature-optimized language. Anyway, you can find more info on cpan's docs about poe.

The internals of POE are weird, and POE does rather silly stuff like statically index the contents of @_ for "speed". A POE-component looks like a little brick of voodoo-dung right in the middle of your code. You might like it, give it a shot. If you have to debug it or expand POE::Kernel you might want to look for employment elsewhere.

There is a growing alternative too: AnyEvent. I'd look at it first. It does things massively different and is a much thinner layer that doesn't want to infest your whole application.

Links:

• AnyEvent::Socket
• POE SocketFactory