You may attend all three of the classes in this series, or any combination. Classes are free, but you must sign up.

The term "regular expressions" refers to specific motifs for a given string. Regular expressions are widely used to search and manipulate large bodies of text based on certain patterns. Perl has extremely powerful syntax for regular expression applications, which lends itself well to bioinformatics and biological applications. Much of the raw data being held in biological data hubs constitutes amino acid and nucleotide sequences along with sequence annotation. Perl regular expressions are an ideal way to search and organize these large datasets quickly.

Library for WWW in Perl (LWP) is a suite of modules that lets your programs download and extract information from the wealth of biological data available on the Web. The LWP modules give the Perl programmer an easy way to access Web resources that provide an API interface, including those at NCBI and EBI. More importantly, LWP modules assist in connecting different resources within a coordinated workflow environment. This class will focus on URL building and the get statement associated with LWP:Simple.

The Perl Database Interface (DBI) module is used to connect to a variety of relational databases. Designed to protect you from the details of the specific databases, DBI has a very simple interface for making your SQL queries and getting the results back. Its main function is to locate and load DBD, or database drivers, which are specific to the relational database of interest. Some knowledge of relational databases and SQL statements is required.