Darthfett
Aerospace/Cybersecurity Software Engineer
- Reaction score
- 615
1. What is Perl?
Perl is an interpreted, general purpose, high level programming language. It is excellent at string and file manipulation, and has great power in regular expressions.
2. Why use Perl?
Perl is great for processing information. In fact, it has been nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of programming languages." Here is a list of Perl's features:
- Regular Expressions make information manipulation easy
- Does not need to be compiled, making debugging fast
- Works well as a CGI script in websites
- Cross-platform (works on multiple OS's)
- Open source
Perl is not the best programming language, either:
- Perl's syntax is hard to read
3. Where can I get perl and Perl support?
perl (the Perl interpreter) can be downloaded here:
http://www.perl.com/download.csp
Tutorials and the official documentation are both online: http://perldoc.perl.org/
With the official documentation, you can look up functions, to see how they're used, and what they do.
You can also look through the perl wiki here:
http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi