Perl

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1. What is Perl?
2. Where do I get Perl?
3. What books should I get?
4. What's this CPAN thing I keep hearing about?
5. For More Information

1. What is Perl?
   

   Perl, Practical Extraction and Report Language, is considered by many to be the language of choice in all things WWW, and so is a very appropriate thing to be discussing on the HWG web site. Born in 1987 as a text manipulation, sockets programming, scripting tool, Perl has grown up into a very impressive full-featured Programming language.

   For the full talk on "What is Perl", you should really see WWW.Perl.Com - the Perl web site. You should also take a look at the Perl Mongers, and support your local chapter.

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2. Where do I get Perl?
   If you're running Unix, or a Unix-like operating system, you can download the source code for Perl from CPAN - just follow the link that says "source code". It should build without any difficulty on almost every Unix out there.

   If you are running Microsoft Windows, you can get a Perl installation from ActiveState. Just click on the link that says "ActivePerl."

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3. What books should I get?

   There are a number of excellent books available to help you in your quest to master Perl. Some of these books are:

   • Programming Perl by Tom Christansen, Randal Schwartz and Larry Wall
   • Learning Perl by Randal Schwartz and Tom Christiansen
   • Advanced Perl Programming by Sriram Srinivasan
   • Effective Perl Programming by Joe Hall
   • Object Oriented Perl by Damian Conway
   • Perl Cookbook by Nathan Torkington and Tom Christiansen
   You can buy any of these books at the HWG Online Bookstore.

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4. What's this CPAN thing I keep hearing about?
   CPAN, the Comprehensice Perl Archive Network, is a very large repository of Perl code (about 750MB right now) to do just about everything. If you're trying to solve a Perl programming problem, chances are pretty good that someone else has already tackled this before, and that the fruit of their efforts is available on CPAN. CPAN is mirrored on dozens of sites around the world, so there is sure to always be one close to you. You can find one at www.cpan.org, and you can find a list of others in the document SITES.html.

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5. For More Information
   
   • Perl.com
   • The Perl Journal
   • CPAN
   • The official Perl FAQs

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