September 2012
Beginner
744 pages
15h 48m
English
Content preview from Beginning PerlBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 1
What Is Perl?
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:
- Getting Perl
- Learning about the community
- Understanding the Perl documentation
- Using a terminal
- Writing your first Hello, World! program
My goodness, where to start? To even begin to cover a language with such a rich history and huge influence over the world of computing and the web is a daunting task, so this chapter just touches on the highlights.
By the time you finish with this chapter, you’ll have a good understanding of the history of Perl and where to go to get more help when you need to know more than this book offers. Learning how to find the answers to your questions is probably one of the most valuable skills you can develop.
Before you install Perl, a word about Perl terminology — information that you need to know to converse intelligently with other Perl users.
The name of the language is Perl. It is not PERL. Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, originally wanted a name with positive connotations and named the language Pearl, but before its release, he discovered another programming language named Pearl, so he shortened the name to Perl.
The name of the language causes a bit of confusion. When people write Perl (uppercase), they are referring to the programming language you learn in this book. When people write perl (lowercase), they are referring to the binary executable used to run Perl, the language.
So perl is the binary and Perl is the language. The former parses and runs the latter: perl parses and runs ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.