Introduction

This book is a collection lessons learned about the programming language Perl. Its purpose is to serve as a example reference and link collection in order to get started with writing Perl scripts in a professional context.

Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it.

- Perl 4 manual pages

Perl 5 includes a number of features which make Perl a general-purpose programming language. Examples for this are support for Object Oriented Programming, Unicode, database integration, etc. (read more).

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlintro.html#What-is-Perl?

Perl borrows syntax and concepts from many languages: awk, sed, C, Bourne Shell, Smalltalk, Lisp and even English.

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html

  • There is more then one way to do it (TIMTOWTDI)
  • Do what I mean (DWIM)

Hello World

use strict;
use warnings;

print "Hello, world";
perl hello-world.pl
Hello, world

About this book

The purpose of this book is to give an overview over those 10% of Perl with which 90% of the tasks can be completed. Its primarily supported use case is looking up basic language elements in the daily work of a Perl Beginner. The contents are mostly consice, self explaining examples. More elaborate descriptions can be found on the linked tutorials.

In Perl there is always more then one way to do it. Don't expect to find the best way here as this book is written - as its name implies - by a Perl Beginner.

Sources of information