Perl Tutorial

Perl is an interpreted programming language known for its power and flexibility. It combines the familiar syntax of C, C++, sed, awk, grep, sh, and csh into a tool that that is more powerful than the separate pieces used together. These pages will teach basic data structures, flow control, and string manipulation in the context of writing a common CGI program for a Web server.

Prerequisites

Basic programming experience (fortran, c, basic, whatever)
No Perl, awk, sed, sh, csh, or grep is necessary, although it's useful.

Disclaimers

This tutorial is necessarily a simplified version of what perl can do. If you know perl, you could find "errors" in many of my statements, but on the other hand, if you know perl, you understand why I'm leaving out the subtleties. Also, I'm leaving out any of the great things about perl 5.

Copies of this documentation

This documentation is available online:

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Training/PerlIntro/

Postscript copies and a Tar file are coming soon.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

johnsonb@ncsa.uiuc.edu

Last modified: May 19, 1998

Retrieved by Memoweb from http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Training/PerlIntro/ at 08/02/99