Typographical Conventions

Typographical Conventions

I use the following conventions in this book:

• Standard text: Times New Roman

• Code examples and URLs: Courier

• User input: Bold Courier

Sometimes my code examples have line breaks where none existed in the original. In places where these line breaks would cause problems or aren't obvious, I've put a backslash (\) at the end of the line to indicate that the line should be joined with the next one.

When I want to show that I typed an end-of-file character in a terminal session, I show it as a Control-D on its own line:

^D

even though those characters will normally be overwritten by the next thing to be printed. Substitute whatever the terminal driver on your operating system uses if not a Control-D (e.g., Control-Z, Return on Windows).

When referring to Perl modules, I will often add ".pm" to the end of one-word module names to follow common practice and avoid confusion, but leave it out of module names with multiple components because that is the convention. For example, CGI.pm, but IO::Socket.

Citations are referenced by a tag in square brackets, for example, [SCOTT01], and the details are given in the Bibliography near the end of the book.

I reference many pages that are part of the standard documentation that comes with every Perl; you can type perldoc followed by the page name and it will display. I show these in italics: for instance, perlsub is the page containing information about subroutines in Perl.