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Perl Seminar I -- Intro
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Introduction
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Perl is a computer language that makes easy things easy and hard
things possible.
- Runs on unix, windows, mac, and others. For free.
- Intrepreted, so the development cycle is quick. Yet
executes very quickly for an interpreted language.
- Extremely rich set of functions, operators, and data structures
that interact well with each other. You can do high-level
things without worrying about the details (e.g. you can
get an html file from a remote server in one line),
or you can worry about details if you want to.
- Excels at text processing, including CGI scripts.
Excellent for small quick scripts, and has adequate facilities
for large, complicated programs.
- Extremely rich set of libraries available, including
facilities for networking, building GUIs, CGI/web programming,
databases, operating system calls, and interactions with
other languages and processes.
It's possible to start small and do useful things in perl without
knowing everything about the language. This is good, because perl is not
a minimal language. Quite the opposite, it has many rich and often
redundant features. Which means there is no right way, and in fact
There Is More Than One Way To Do It.
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Objective
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I can't teach you to program in 60 minutes. I can't teach programmers
how to use perl in 60 minutes. What I hope to do is give you
enough of a whiz-bang tour so you can get a good idea of
what perl can do, how well it can do it, and what it will take
for you to learn more. At that point, you can make a sensible
decision. Perl I, together with Perl II, cover the essentialls
of what I consider Core Perl.
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Prerequisites
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I strongly suggest you have
some exposure to another programming language.
You certainly don't have to be an expert programmer, but you should
know about assigning variables, loops and conditionals, and arrays.
Exposure to C, sh, awk, sed are useful. Even basic (ugh!) would help.
It would also be helpful if you have some minimal experience in
using a text editor to write a program.
This is not a hands-on seminar, but the ultimate goal is for you
to pull up an editor, write a program, and run it. (And debug it!)
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What's Covered
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We'll cover the core: kinds of variables, control structures, operators
and functions, and regular expressions. You can build all sorts of
useful programs with what we discuss, although they might not be
as elegant or powerful as you could build with more advanced features.
The important thing is that we'll cover enough to give you a sense
of perl, so you can decide if you want to go further.
Note, though, that these web pages are extremely brief. They are in
no sense intended as a substitute for the seminar, and are not adequate
for self-study. Mostly, they are props for the seminar. There are
many books and tutorials on perl, which are much better for this purpose.
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What's NOT Covered
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Well, we won't cover most of perl, although I hope to cover
the bare essentials. Subroutines, ties, special variables,
and various idioms are covered in Perl II. References,
and the sophisticated data structures they enable, are covered
in Perl III. And Perl IV covers the vagaries of CGI scripts.
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