Introduction

Why Perl?

Perl is a highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 35 years of development. It was designed for text processing and remains unmatched for quick data manipulation, system administration, and glue code.

  • Text processing — Perl's regular expressions and string operations are legendary. It was built to process text, and it shows.
  • CPAN — the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network has over 200,000 modules covering everything from web frameworks to bioinformatics.
  • Practical extraction — Perl excels at reading files, extracting data, and generating reports. One-liners can replace entire shell scripts.
  • Cross-platform — Perl runs on virtually every operating system and comes pre-installed on most Unix-like systems.
  • Mature ecosystem — used in production at Amazon, BBC, Booking.com, and countless infrastructure tools worldwide.

What You Will Learn

This course has 15 lessons organized into 5 chapters:

  1. Perl Basics — hello world, scalar variables, arithmetic, and string operations.
  2. Control Flow — if/unless, while/until, for/foreach loops.
  3. Data Structures — arrays, hashes, and data operations like join and split.
  4. Functions & I/O — subroutines, string functions, grep, and map.
  5. Advanced Perl — data processing and a capstone project combining everything.

Each lesson runs in your browser via a Perl-to-JavaScript transpiler — no installation required.

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