Learning Perl, 3rd Edition

Preface

Welcome to the third edition of Learning Perl.

If you’re looking for the best way to spend your first 30 to 45 hours with the Perl programming language, look no further. In the pages that follow, you’ll find a carefully paced introduction to the language that remains the workhorse of the Internet, as well as the language of choice for system administrators, web hackers, and casual programmers around the world.

We can’t give you all of Perl in just a few hours. The books that promise that are probably fibbing a bit. Instead, we’ve carefully selected a complete and useful subset of Perl for you to learn, good for programs from one to 128 lines long, which end up being about 90% of the programs in use out there. And when you’re ready to go on, we’ve included a number of pointers for further education.

Each chapter is small enough to be read in an hour or two. Each chapter ends with a series of exercises to help you practice what you’ve just learned, with the answers in Appendix A for your reference. Thus, this book is ideally suited for a classroom “introduction to Perl” course. We know this directly, because the material for this book was lifted almost word-for-word from our flagship “Learning Perl” course, delivered to thousands of students around the world. However, we’ve designed the book for self-study as well.

Although Perl lives as the “toolbox for Unix,” you don’t have to be a Unix guru, or even a Unix user, to use this book. Unless otherwise noted, everything we’re ...