Introduction to Perl

This course is an introduction to the Perl language. The Perl language is primarily used to provide dynamic web content and to do system administration tasks, although it can be used for any programming task. Most of LearningMeasure.com is run via Perl scripts. The author of this course used Perl to process data for his dissertation work.

In this course you will learn a little about the Perl language, and will be able to write some fairly basic scripts by the time you have completed this course. This course alse is meant to introduce some basic programming concepts as well that are common to most programming languages.

The following is the course outline for PERL101:

• Downloading and installing Perl
• She-bang
• Hello World!
• The print Statement
• Variables
• Simple Arithmetic
• Perl and the Web
  • The Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
  • The "Hello World" CGI script
• Subroutines
• Functions
  • Numeric Functions
  • Time-related Functions
• A simple date script
• Conditional Execution
  • The "if", "elsif", and "else" statement
  • The "unless" statement.
  • The Comparison Operators
  • The difference between "and" (&&) and "or" (||)
  • A more complex date script (Happy New Year!)
  • The date script revisited
• Looping
  • The "until" statement
  • The "while" statement
  • The "for" statement
• The "die" and "warn" statements
• Reading from and Writing to a file
  • The "open" statement
  • Reading from a file
  • Writing to a file
  • The "close" statement
• Summary

This course assumes no previous programming knowledge, although do not skip this course if you do know another language and want to learn Perl. It also assumes that you can download and run Perl on your computer. Having cgi-bin (script execution) access on a web server will be helpful, but not required to take this course. Also this course assumes that you have some sort of text editor to edit program files.