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What Is Perl?

Perl is a highly versatile scripting language that was released in the late 1980s, and has been available in versions 4, 5, and 6 (which is the current release). Perl has very strong roots in C, and each major version of Perl has been a significant rewrite of its predecessor. While Perl supports object-oriented features (e.g., objects and inheritance), it does not to the same extent as scripting languages such as Python and Ruby.

If you are new to Perl, you will quickly discover that it has very sophisticated text-processing capabilities. Perl can 'overload' a variable in the sense that different prefix meta-characters for the same variable can represent different variable types. For example, $abc, @abc, and %abc represent a scalar, an array, and a hash, respectively. This mechanism has a dual effect: Perl scripts can be incredibly compact and powerful, yet difficult to understand for novices (and even more experienced Perl programmers). Therefore, while it is easy to become productive in Perl, you may find that true mastery of Perl requires a longer learning curve than some other scripting languages. One of the best ways to broaden your knowledge and deepen your understanding of Perl is through practice and reading code samples.

By necessity, this appendix can only cover a limited subset of the features of Perl, and it will focus on presenting basic yet useful constructs in Perl that you can use for automating standard text-related tasks and also for understanding the Perl scripts in this book. If you want to learn more about Perl, you can find a number of excellent books in bookstores or on the Web. A superb book for learning Perl is Perl by Example by David Medinets, after which you can read Perl 5 How-To by Mike Glover, Aidan Humphreys, and Ed Weiss, which contains very interesting combinations of Perl constructs.

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