Learning Perl, 7th Edition

Preface

Welcome to the seventh edition of Learning Perl, updated for Perl 5.24 and its latest features. This book is still mostly good even if you are still using Perl 5.8 (although, it’s been a long time since it was released; have you thought about upgrading?).

We hope you’re reading this preface before you buy the book because there’s a historical hiccup that may cause some confusion. There’s another language, Perl 6, that started off as a replacement for Perl 5 but then went out on its own without changing the name. As we write this, Perl 5 is probably the version you want. It’s the widely installed and used language that people mean when they say simply “Perl.” It’s the one you want if you don’t know why this paragraph is here.

If you’re looking for the best way to spend your first 30 to 45 hours with the Perl programming language, you’ve found it. In the pages that follow, you’ll find a carefully paced introduction to the language that is the workhorse of the Internet, as well as the language of choice for system administrators, web hackers, and casual programmers around the world. We’ve designed this book based on the in-person classes we teach, so we’ve timed the book for a week’s worth of work.

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 useful subset of Perl for you to learn, good for programs from 1 to 128 lines long, which end up being about 90% of the programs in use out ...