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This tutorial barely scratches the surface of what you can do with Perl. I haven't even talked about hash variables! What was I thinking? :-)
Not to worry. There's a wealth of documentation out there that explains everything you could ever want to know about Perl. Indeed, the biggest problem with the Perl documentation, at least for beginners, is knowing where to start. Below are some suggestions.
This page covers:
There is a very complete set of documentation that comes free with Perl. If everyone was tied down and forced to read every word of it, well, we'd all know a lot more about Perl. Of course, we'd also have a lot less time to write Perl scripts. Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium.
Read the Perl documentation by typing "man perl" at the Unix command line. If you are on a system that doesn't have the "man" command (say, because you installed Perl locally on your PC or Mac, and you're trying to access the documentation there), you can use "perldoc perl" instead, assuming you have a recent enough version of Perl.
The Perl documentation has been split up into numerous sections; you access the appropriate section by typing "man sectionname" or "perldoc sectionname". More about this, including the list of section names, in that first "man perl" or "perldoc perl" page.
You also should know about a neat trick: If you type "perldoc -f", followed by the name of a particular perl function, you will get the part of the "man perlfunc" page that describes that function. For example:
catlow:/u1/l/lies> perldoc -f join
=item join EXPR,LIST
Joins the separate strings of LIST into a single string with
fields separated by the value of EXPR, and returns the string.
Example:
$_ = join(':', $login,$passwd,$uid,$gid,$gcos,$home,$shell);
See L<perlfunc/split>.
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The Perl FAQ (for "Frequently Asked Questions") file is accessed by entering "man perlfaq" or "perldoc perlfaq" at the command line. The screen you see there in turn refers you to "man perlfaq1", "man perlfaq2", and so on, with each of those FAQ files containing a different set of questions and answers. Unlike some other FAQ's, Perl's really is incredibly complete and useful; most of the Perl questions you're likely to come up with are covered.
Indeed, it's so complete, it can be hard to find the specific part that deals with your particular question. So now, if your version of Perl is recent enough, there's another neat perldoc trick: "perldoc -q something" will search through the Perl FAQs and print entries that contain "something".
As I said, you can browse all this important Perl documentation from the command line, and you'll score machismo points by doing so, but you can also find it on the Web, and that's probably the most convenient way for a beginner to access it. Here are links to the appropriate pages at the www.perl.com site:
Some other handy Web sites are:
I used to say there were exactly three (3) Perl books you should try to own. They all came from O'Reilly & Associates:
Now another book has come out that you really should try to get: Elements of Programming with Perl, by Andrew Johnson. It's the first really good Perl book written specifically for beginning programmers.
I put Usenet at the end of the list for a reason: Bursting into comp.lang.perl.misc with novice CGI questions is a sure way to get flamed. You're more likely to get useful answers (and less likely to get your hair parted) in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi. And in general, you should make sure before posting to either group that you've made a sincere effort to answer the question yourself via the resources outlined above. You should also probably hit DejaNews to make sure someone didn't ask the same question last week.
That's it. Have (the appropriate amount of) fun with Perl!
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John Callender
jbc@west.net
http://www.west.net/~jbc/