Brief course description

Coordinates

British Columbia Library Association Continuing Education Workshop
Richmond Public Library, Richmond, BC
September 15-16, 2007

Instructors

John Durno (University of Victoria)
Mark Jordan (Simon Fraser University)

Prerequisites

Participants should be comfortable with using a text editor and an operating system command line. It is assumed students will have little to no prior knowledge of Perl or other scripting languages.

Goal

This course will introduce students to using Perl, a popular and flexible scripting language, to manipulate the principle types of structured data encountered in library work: delimited, MARC, and XML.

Objectives

Upon completion of this course students will be able to:

  • Write Perl scripts to parse and manipulate structured data
  • Recognize where the use of scripting tools is preferable to graphical applications
  • Use Perl's MARC::Record, XML::Writer, and XML::Simple modules

Content

This course will cover the following topics:

  1. Introduction to Perl
  2. Basic Perl syntax
  3. Writing and running scripts
  4. Handling input and output from/to files and the terminal
  5. Perl operators, control structures, and functions
  6. Perl modules and object syntax
  7. Transforming delimited data files to MARC and XML formats
  8. Modifying a file of MARC records
  9. Parsing XML

Final Activity

Students will convert a file of delimited records to MARC and XML formats, using Perl's MARC::Record and XML::Writer Modules.