What do I need to start programming in Perl?

[Mears]

Don't know one thing about Perl, but I plan on learning it. Do I need a compiler or anything or do web browsers do all the work?

 

[Electric Amish]

DOH! Sorry, Royaldank is right, you don't need a compiler for perl...

Web browsers don't do anything with perl.

amish

 

[royaldank]

Perl is a scripting language. Meaning, no compiling.

Best place to start is find a little tutorial to reference and then create some forms. Master getting the info in and sending a quick sendmail message to yourself.

Then, try creating a page on the fly using some sort of database. Figure out how to integrate database calls and things of that nature.

That would give you a couple good projects to spend a week or two on. More if you aren't a database kind of person.

Then, if you want more practice, put those together and make a ListServ program. Get new users, store them in a database, and develop an admin side to email users based on different criteria (just different SQL statements).

If you did all this, you'd be well on your way to learning Perl with a hands on approach.

 

[ys]

You need a Perl interpreter installed.

Linky

CPAN for Perl sources.

Buy a book(Oreilly's Learning or Programming Perl is pretty good) then you can have have all the regular expression fun

 

[thomsbrain]

i heard perl was really hard, is that true?

 

[stndn]

http://www.perldoc.com
http://www.cpan.org/
http://www.activestate.com/ (to get the perl interpreter)

first off, don't start thinking of perl as the tools to create cgi, or other things related to websites.
think of it as a tool for text manipulator, scriptings, etc. start with basic projects to edit text files and other stuffs, etc. then move up from there once you get the hang of it.

you don't need a compiler for perl. you need a perl interpreter.
i think of perl as a semi-scripting language. meaning, it is interpreted when you execute it, but it actually goes through the whole script (and try to look for errors) before running it from top. that means if you have (syntatical) error(s), the script won't run
for pure scripting language (eg shell script), it would be interpreted on the fly as you go. so it can go halfway and then barf out if it finds error in the middle.

for books, i also recommend the o'reilly book (been using the book for a while )

(there's some guys here with the snake avatar and mad guy avatar who knows perl quite well -- forgot their names <sorry> -- i'm sure they will drop by here sometimes soon and give you some additional info)

-876-

 

[mithrandir2001]

Perl is "hard" because it is easy to write sloppy, incoherent Perl code. It's can be very powerful, but that power comes at a price. Of all the major languages, Perl is the one where the writer of the code is probably the only person who can understand it (quite unlike VB, for example). It may not be so hard to write Perl code, but it is difficult to learn from existing code.

 

[tallest1]

Perl is like Super-Javascript with file access. I love it.

I suggest you grab a beginners book on perl over at good ol Barnes & Nobles

 

[IJump]

You do have a computer, right? All of this reading won't do much good if you don't have one of those fancy pants machines.


Read up, perl is good, and hard, as has been said. Take your time learning it. Start small and work your way to the bigger things.

 

[Ameesh]

<< Perl is a scripting language. Meaning, no compiling. >>



not quite true, some scripting languages can can be compiled.


perl needs an interperter. and its not hard like everyone is saying, it is a scripting language, hence its easy, a scripting language that was hard would defeat the purpose

get a book, read up. aim to make a project.

 

[jaeger66]

You need the logic/analytical skills that all good programmers have. The languages are all pretty much the same.

 

[Sir Fredrick]

The O'Reiley books are a GREAT place to start, then check out Matt's Script Archive (search for it), for some great example code you can mess with.