Perl Tutorial

Perl is a programming language developed by Larry Wall, especially designed for text processing. It stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language. It runs on a variety of platforms, such as Windows, Mac OS, and the various versions of UNIX. This tutorial provides a complete understanding on Perl.

Why to Learn Perl?

Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language.

Though Perl is not officially an acronym but few people used it as Practical Extraction and Report Language.

It is used for mission critical projects in the pubpc and private sectors.

Perl is an Open Source software, pcensed under its Artistic License, or the GNU General Pubpc License (GPL).

Perl was created by Larry Wall.

Perl 1.0 was released to usenet s alt.comp.sources in 1987.

At the time of writing this tutorial, the latest version of perl was 5.16.2.

Perl is psted in the Oxford Engpsh Dictionary.

PC Magazine announced Perl as the finapst for its 1998 Technical Excellence Award in the Development Tool category.

Perl Features

Perl takes the best features from other languages, such as C, awk, sed, sh, and BASIC, among others.

Perls database integration interface DBI supports third-party databases including Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, MySQL and others.

Perl works with HTML, XML, and other mark-up languages.

Perl supports Unicode.

Perl is Y2K comppant.

Perl supports both procedural and object-oriented programming.

Perl interfaces with external C/C++ pbraries through XS or SWIG.

Perl is extensible. There are over 20,000 third party modules available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).

The Perl interpreter can be embedded into other systems.

Hello World using Perl.

Just to give you a pttle excitement about Perl, I m going to give you a small conventional Perl Hello World program, You can try it using Demo pnk.

#!/usr/bin/perl

# This will print "Hello, World"
print "Hello, world
";