Chapter 8, Regular Expressions
The regular expression test program shows you
want part of a string matched and what didn't:

#!/usr/bin/perl

while (<>) {                   # take one input line at a time
    chomp;
    if (/YOUR_PATTERN_GOES_HERE/) {
        print "Matched: |$`<$&>$'|\n";  # the special match vars
    } else {
        print "No match: |$_|\n";
    }
}


Chapter 14, Strings and Sorting
Here's a list of numbers that you can use for Exercise 1:

17 1000 04 1.50 3.14159
-10 1.5 4 2001 90210 666
9 0 2 1 0
2001 42 -40 98.6 2.71828

Here's a hash of mixed-cased names you need for Exercise 2:

my %last_name = qw{
    fred flintstone Wilma Flintstone Barney Rubble
    betty rubble Bamm-Bamm Rubble PEBBLES FLINTSTONE
};


Chapter 16, Process Management
If you don't have the Unix date command, here's a
pure Perl version that can fake it for you.
Name it date and put it somewhere in your path:

my $date = localtime;
print "$date\n";