Learning Perl Through Examples

Download tutorial intituled Learning Perl Through Examples, it's a free training document under 72 pages by Yun Shen.

Table of contents

• Background
• What Is Perl
• Language Design Philosophy
• Perl Classification
• Borrowed Features
• Authentic Features
• Where Perl is used
• Major versions
• Language Scope
• Language Elements
• Advantage Over C
• Disadvantage Over C
• Some famous applications
• Get to know Perl Environment
• Connecting to SCC
• Download source code
• Exercise 1 - Where is My Perl
• What do we learn from Exercise 1
• Exercise 2 – Perl Program Structure
• Exercise 2 – Check Source Code
• What do we learn from Exercise 2
• Using Perl
• Command line Option Explained
• Command line Examples
• Good Programming Practices
• Variable Scope Example 1
• Code Examples
• Packages and Modules
• Perl help system
• Perl Debugger
• Q & A

Generalities about Perl

Perl is a programming language for text file processing as well as system and application administration tasks. Available in the public domain for Unix environments, Linux, Windows ... it knows today a very important development.

Created in 1986 by Larry Wall, Perl has since known many versions, today we use Perl5, version 5.61 is now final.

Perl is an interpreted language and Perl programs are distributed in source format. The interpreted term is however ambiguous because a Perl program runs in two phases:

the pre-compilation of the program that produces pseudo-code, then the interpretation of the pseudo-code (the actual execution). The pseudo-code of Perl contains more than 300 meta-instructions, at the end of the pre-compilation one obtains a sequence of autonomous pseudo-codes which have pointers towards their operands and the following meta-instruction. Perl is very referenced on the Web, among the main sites are:
- http://www.perl.org (all about Perl)
- http://www.perl.com (all about Perl also)
- http://www.cpan.org (distribution of Perl and modules)