Minimal Perl

Preface

In this preface, I’ll tell you about the history of Minimal Perl and the origins of this book.

The History of Minimal Perl

The seeds of this book were sown many years ago, when I was building up my knowledge of Perl, the greatest programming language I’d ever encountered (before or since). While reading a variety of books on the subject, I was surprised that the authors felt obliged to delve into so many of the different but equivalent choices for expressing every basic operation in the language, as well as each of the syntactic variations for expressing any one of those choices.

As an example, I’ve shown here some of the available choices for expressing in Perl the simple idea that B should be executed only if A is True (with those letters ...