Chapter 1, Introduction to Catalyst serves as an introduction to Catalyst and its features. You will also learn how to install it and get it up and running.

Chapter 2, Creating a Catalyst Application shows how to create a Catalyst application skeleton, step through the different files in its directories, and learn how to generate HTML output and connect a SQLite database to Catalyst.

Chapter 3, Building a Real Application covers the building of our first real application—the address book. We learn to design and apply the "CRUD" interface to the database of our site and write some Catalyst actions.

Chapter 4, Expanding the Application explains how to make deployment easy by using the configuration file. We add some of the most common features that web applications need to our address book application. We learn how to add sessions to our application programmed search logic and to identify users and use their identity to control access to the application. We will also learn how to display resultsets that span multiple pages. Finally, we will learn how to utilize our application's model outside of our application. Later, we explore authentication and authorization by implementing page-level and record-level access control.

Chapter 5, Building a More Advanced Application covers how to build a new application called ChatStat. Here we explore the features of DBIC for easy handling of data and use Catalyst to get the data from DBIC onto the Web.

Chapter 6, Building Your Own Model covers the different ways to access the data model. We learn to write a database model and create a filesystem model from scratch, which is integrated with the Catalyst application.

Chapter 7, Hot Web Topics covers the development of a REST API to give the user easy access to our application's data. We also learn to add AJAX interactivity and incorporate RSS feeds in our application.

Chapter 8, Moose shows how Moose can make declarations of methods and properties simpler in our application. We also examine how chained controllers can be easily defined with Catalyst::Declare. We will also discover how Moose allows for Method Signatures and Property constraints along with best practices.

Chapter 9, Deployment teaches us to package our application and make it available as a PAR file, ready to run on a real web server.

Chapter 10, Testing covers an important part of any project, that is, testing. We learn to write programs to test our Catalyst application automatically. We see how to test the individual non-Catalyst components, and then the components inside Catalyst.

A working machine using Linux, OS X, or Windows on which you have permission to install Perl and Perl packages.

This book is written for Perl developers who want to start or strengthen their skill and understanding of web application development using MVC principles.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "The next step is to create a template in the root/hello directory."

A block of code is set as follows:

sub atom : Local {
  my ($self, $c) = @_;
  $c->stash->{type} = 'Atom';
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

package AddressBook::Controller::Address;
use Moose;
use namespace::autoclean;
BEGIN {extends 'Catalyst::Controller'; }
extends 'Catalyst::Controller::FormBuilder'; 
=head1 NAME

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ apt-get install libcatalyst-perl

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The first link on the index page is Look at all people."

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