about perl
Perl is the Practical Extraction and Report Language, or maybe Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister. Larry Wall, the creator, wanted to name it pearl. Impatient reads should browse The Power of Perl presentation.
Perl is a free, open source, scripting language available for almost any platform. It is powerful, flexible, easy to learn and fun to master. Because it was created by someone who is a linguist, it is highly idiomatic. Perl is the "glue of the Internet" and it "fills in the cracks" between other programs. Although Perl is frequently used to manipulate text, it can be used for nearly everything, from one-line scripts to multi-developer projects.
Perl's current version is 5.8.1. Perl 6 updates the current slogan "making easy things easy and hard things possible" to "making easy things trivial, hard things easy, and impossible things merely hard". Perl does not make simple tasks pointlessly complex.
The bioinformatics community has adopted Perl as its de facto language. Perl has powerful features to easily convert files between different formats, interface with databases, create graphics and make dynamic web pages. A large open source effort, bioperl, provides the community with a library of code to manipulate and analyze biological data. And experts agree that Perl saved the Human Genome Project.
Perl Resources
Read Perl News and Perl Journal (archive).
Perl Documentation
Perl man pages are an excellent source of dietary perl. They are tersely written, but you can always learn something new. Perl has many different man pages. To see the list, type at your LINUX prompt:
> man perl
To learn about perl syntax and control structures read perlsyn, perldata and perlop. To explore references and data structures, read perlreftut and perldsc, and perlref. Support for a superset of regular expressions are one of Perl's most loved features - read about them at perlrequick and perlretut, and perlre. Perl has funny special variables, pervar, and an idiomatic culture, perlstyle. Finally, when you are writing scripts do not forget to use POD to document them, perlpod.
All these man pages are online at Perldoc.com.
Perl Books and Literature
We have quite a lot of online Perl literature at the GSC.
If you know some Perl and would like to take the next step, we highly recommend that you read Effective Perl Programming. This cookbook-like approach will steer you away from common traps and illustrate Perl paradigms and style. This is the "best book for impatient Perl programmers."
O'Reilly has published many books about Perl. Most of them are technically excellent, well written and presented in a light, often funny, style. We have many of these books here - ask around - and there are sample chapters available for download at O'Reilly's site. For a more complete list, try learn.perl.org which has some free online books.
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Many good articles about Perl are regularly posted to perl.com and there is a large archive of past submissions.
Modules
The one-stop shop for modules the Comprehensive Perl Achive Network, or CPAN. This is a collection of overl 5,000 modules which breathe utility and life into Perl. To learn about modules, read perlmod man page.
> man perlmod
To learn how to install modules from CPAN, read perlmodinstall man page. When you're ready to make your own modules, read the perlmodlib and perlmod.
These Learning Objects, References and Modules O'Reilly book provides a good introduction to making, testing and distributing modules. Another excellent source is Effective Perl Programming, a cookbook of idioms and style guides.
Tutorials
Visit the tutorials written by Perl Monks at the Perl monestary. Read how other people are using Perl for cool things.
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