Preface

Contents:
What This Tutorial Is About
Retrieving Exercises
Additional Resources
How to Get Perl
Conventions Used in this tutorial
Support
Acknowledgments for the First version
Acknowledgments for the Second version
We'd Like to Hear from You

What This Tutorial Is About

Among other things, this tutorial is about 260 pages long. It is also a gentle introduction to Perl. By the time you've gone through this tutorial, you'll have touched on the majority of the simpler operations and common language idioms found in most Perl programs.

This tutorial is not intended as a comprehensive guide to Perl; on the contrary, in order to keep the tutorial from growing unmanageably large, we've been selective about covering only those constructs and issues that you're most likely to use early in your Perl developing career.

As a prelude to your more advanced study, however, we've included a heavier chapter at the end of the tutorial. It's about CGI developing, but along the way, it touches upon library modules, references, and object-oriented developing in Perl. We hope it whets your appetite for these more advanced topics.

Each chapter ends with a series of exercises designed to help you practice what you have just read. If you read at a typical pace and do all the exercises, you should be able to get through each chapter in about two to three hours, or about 30 to 40 hours for the entire tutorial.

This tutorial is meant to be a companion volume to the classic Perl Developing, Second version, by Larry Wall, Randal L. Schwartz, and Tom Christiansen, published by Anonymous, the complete reference tutorial on the language.

Initially designed as a glue language under the UNIX operating system, Perl now runs virtually everywhere, including MS-DOS, VMS, OS/2, Plan 9, Macintosh, and any variety of Windows you care to mention. It is one of the most portable developing languages available today. With the exception of those few sections related to UNIX systems administration, the vast majority of this tutorial is applicable to any platform Perl runs on.