Perl 101

The Anatomy of a Camel

Douglas E. Miles

  1. What is Perl?
    1. "Practical Extraction and Report Language"
    2. "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister"
    3. The Swiss Army Chainsaw
    4. Eclectic - C, sed, awk, sh, csh, Pascal, BASIC-PLUS, FORTRAN
      Eclectic
      1 : selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles 2 : composed of elements drawn from various sources;
  2. Data Types ($@%)
    1. Scalars ($)
    2. Lists and Arrays (@)
    3. Hashes (%)
  3. Control Structures
    1. Statement/Code block
    2. if/elsif/else/unless
    3. while/until, do while/until
    4. for/foreach
  4. Basic IO
    1. STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR
    2. Diamond Operator (<>)
    3. print and printf
  5. Functions (&)
    1. Arguments
    2. Return Values
  6. CPAN
    1. Comprehensive Perl Archive Network - http://www.perl.com/CPAN/
    2. perl -MCPAN -e shell
  7. References
    1. Learning Perl (The Llama)
    2. Programming Perl (The Camel)
    3. The Perl man pages