December 1998
Beginner to intermediate
674 pages
40h 41m
English
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Chapter 1. Introduction to Perl
Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy. Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible. Perl makes it easy to manipulate numbers, text, files, directories, computers, networks, and programs. It also makes it easy to develop, modify, and debug your own programs portably, on any modern operating system.
Perl is especially popular with systems programmers and web developers, but it also appeals to a much broader audience. Originally designed for text processing, it has grown into a sophisticated, general-purpose programming language with a rich software development environment complete with debuggers, profilers, cross-referencers, compilers, interpreters, libraries, syntax-directed editors, and all the rest of the trappings of a “real” programming language.
There are many reasons for Perl’s success. For starters, Perl is freely available and freely redistributable. But that’s not enough to explain the Perl phenomenon, since many other freeware packages fail to thrive. Perl is not just free; it’s also fun. People feel like they can be creative in Perl, because they have freedom of expression.
Perl is both a very simple language and a very rich language. It’s a simple language in that the types and structures are simple to use and understand, and it borrows heavily from other languages you may already be familiar with. You don’t have to know everything there is to ...
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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.