Perl Tutorial for beginners

Perl is a high level language, developed by Larry Wall (a System admin working for NASA in late 1980s). When we say high level it means that this language uses common english that can be easily understood by humans. Perl stands for “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language”. Perl is object oriented language that supports all the OOPs features such as inheritance, multiple inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation etc.

Use of Perl

Perl is a popular programming language used for web applications development. One of the reasons perl is popular in web, is that the perl was initially developed for text processing, which is what we need to do frequently while developing web.

There are several things you can do with perl, Perl is commonly used for text processing, CGI(Common Gateway interface) programming, interfacing with databases, developing GUI applications, performing simple and complex system tasks, checking security issues, extracting data & generating reports etc.

In short, perl is commonly used for system admin tasks because of its ability to make them easy.

Why would I use Perl language?

There are several reasons, few of them are as follows:

1. Perl is easy to learn.
2. Perl is portable. Perl program can run on any operating system that has Perl installed.
3. Perl can integrate with most modern databases, work with HTML, XML and other mark-up languages, and has full support for unicode.
4. Perl is a cross platform language. Ability of a programming language (such as Java, Perl) that enables programmers to write a program only once. Cross-platform application can run on most or all systems with little or no modification. Also called multi-platform.
5. Perl is open source that has a large and friendly community, that means that the bugs are fixed quickly.
6. Perl also has a very powerful security feature called “taint”. When taint mode is enabled, Perl monitors every variable that comes from outside of the code. This includes anything read from STDIN(User input) or any other file input as well as all environment variables.

What is CPAN?

While learning Perl, you would hear this term more often. CPAN is Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, your one-stop archive for everything related to Perl. It has source codes, documentation, Perl examples, extensions etc. You can browse it at this link: http://search.cpan.org/

Tutorials

Note: Perl tutorials are under development. We are constantly adding new tutorials, As soon as we publish new tutorial, we will add it to the list below:

• • Perl Installation
  • First Perl Program
  • Perl Syntax and naming convention
  • Data types in Perl
  • Perl Variables
  • my keyword – local and global variables
  • Perl – Scalars
  • Use strict and use warnings in Perl
  • Perl – Arrays
  • Perl – Hashes
  • Operators in Perl
  • Conditional statements in Perl
    • if statement
    • if-else statement
    • if-elsif-else statement
    • unless statement
    • unless-else statement
    • unless-elsif-else statement
    • switch case statement
    • given-when-default statement
  • Loops and loop control statements
    • for loop
    • while loop
    • do-while loop
    • foreach loop
    • until loop
  • Perl – subroutines
  • Perl Strings
  • Perl String Escape Sequences