Norm Matloff's Quick Introduction to the Perl Language

Norm Matloff's Introduction to the Perl Language

Professor Norm Matloff
Dept. of Computer Science
University of California at Davis
Davis, CA 95616

(Please mail any questions to Norm Matloff.)

"Do you know Perl?" This is a job-interview question asked by many employers. Here is how you can begin to develop skills in that language.

The Perl language, which achieved great popularity among Unix users, is also used by many people on other platforms, such as Windows, Macs and so on. The language can be thought of as being half way between a csh/bash/ksh script and the C language. The Perl language powers a large portion of the World Wide Web. It is especially neat for line-oriented applications, i.e. applications dealing with lines of input text, and applications involving strings.

Here is my "quick and painless" introduction to Perl.