Perl tutorial for beginners

Download a free course in PDF about Perl programming language, a complet training document under 120 pages by Geoffrey Sampson.

This programming language is very rich and powerful, is a toolbox very useful in many situations: system administration, text manipulation (mail, logs, linguistics, genetics), network programming (CGI, mod_perl, etc.), databases, interfaces graphics, etc. Its numerous libraries make it quickly irreplaceable in the eyes of those who acquire control. The handling of the language is facilitated by many possible reconciliations with the C, the shell or awk. Its POSIX compliance makes it an indispensable ally for the system administrator.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Getting started
• Data types
• Operators
• Number and string operators
• Combining operator and assignment
• Truth-value operators
• Flow of control: branches
• Program layout
• Built-in functions
• Flow of control: loops
• Reading from a file
• Pattern matching
• Matching and substitution
• Character classes
• Complement classes and indefinite repetition
• Capturing subpatterns
• Alternatives
• Escaping special characters
• Greed versus anorexia
• Pattern-internal back-reference
• Transliteration
• Writing to a file
• Reading, writing, appending
• Pattern-matching modifier letters
• Generalizing special cases
• Arrays
• Tables with numbered cells
• An example
• Assigning a list to an array
• Adding elements to and removing them from arrays
• Other operations on arrays