Learning Perl – Introduction

Perl has long been known as the “duct tape of the Internet,” or "the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" powering everything from quick scripts to complex web applications. Whether you’re a complete beginner or coming from another programming language, learning Perl opens up a world of possibilities for text processing, automation, and rapid prototyping.

In this blog series, I’ll share my knowledge in Perl, highlighting the language’s unique features, practical tips, and the occasional quirk that makes Perl both powerful and fun. We’ll start with the basics—variables, control structures, and subroutines before diving into more advanced topics like regular expressions, modules, and object-oriented Perl.

Perl’s motto is “There’s more than one way to do it,” and you’ll soon discover just how flexible and expressive the language can be. Whether you want to automate tasks, manipulate data, or just explore a classic scripting language, Perl has something to offer.

The only prerequisite for following along is that you have Perl installed on your system. If you’re not sure, just type perl -v in your terminal to check.

If you do not know what a terminal is then first look at - https://dev.to/brouberol/discovering-the-terminal-5ddf - If you are on a mac then I would recommend https://iterm2.com/ as a replacement for the default.

If you are on a windows take a look at Strawberry perl

I look forward to sharing tips, examples, and insights that will help you get the most out of Perl. I hope in the end you’ll find this series both helpful and inspiring.