Next Previous Contents

Introduction to Perl

Satheesh Babu, `[email protected]`

v1.0, 08 August 1999

A brief introduction to getting started with Perl. This is not aimed at getting you proficient in writing CGI scripts, but to help you decide on when and how (not) to use Perl. Working knowledge of any programming language is assumed.

1. Introduction

1.1 Short History
1.2 Evolution
1.3 Relevance
1.4 Installation
1.5 Similarities to common languages/tools

2. Tutorial

2.1 First Step
2.2 Running Perl
2.3 Scalars
2.4 Lists (Arrays)
2.5 Hashes (Associative Arrays)
2.6 Control Structures
2.7 File operations
2.8 String Processing
2.9 Subroutines
2.10 More information

3. Useful Examples

3.1 Processing colon delimited Excel files
3.2 Processing fixed format text files
3.3 Report Generation and Formatting
3.4 DBM Databases
3.5 Exercise

4. Modules

4.1 Where to get them?
4.2 Modules vs. coding
4.3 Well known modules

5. Other choices

5.1 Python - OOP
5.2 TCL - GUI, Expect, Commercial support
5.3 PHP - Web Scripting

6. References

6.1 Books
6.2 WWW
6.3 Scripts' Archives