Perl Home
Perl, originally developed by Larry Wall, is a mature, dynamic, and versatile programming language. While renowned for its powerful text processing capabilities (its name stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language), Perl is used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development (e.g., with frameworks like Mojolicious or Dancer), network programming, bioinformatics, GUI development, and more. It runs on numerous platforms, including Windows, macOS, and various UNIX/Linux distributions.
This tutorial aims to provide a solid understanding of modern Perl programming, focusing on current best practices and core concepts.
Audience
Section titled “Audience”This tutorial is designed for beginners with some programming experience, as well as developers familiar with other languages who wish to learn Perl. It covers concepts from basic syntax to more advanced topics like references and an introduction to coding standards.
Prerequisites
Section titled “Prerequisites”Before you begin, a basic understanding of general programming concepts (like variables, loops, conditional statements) is beneficial. Familiarity with using a command-line interface (shell) will be helpful for running Perl scripts and examples. While prior knowledge of C or Unix shell scripting can be advantageous, it’s not strictly required.
We recommend having a Perl interpreter (version 5.10 or newer for features like say and state variables) installed on your system. Most Linux and macOS systems come with Perl pre-installed. For Windows, Strawberry Perl or ActivePerl are popular distributions.