Who should attend: Programmers with previous experience either in a structured programming language, like C, C++, Pascal, Python, or Java, or else in a scripting language like the Bourne shell, Javascript, or Tcl. While some previous exposure to Perl is beneficial, it's not essential.

Designed to be programmer-friendly and platform-neutral, Perl is a high-level, general-purpose programming language that makes easy things easy and hard things possible. Now moving into its second decade, Perl has become the language of choice across all platforms for programmers engaged in rapid prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, and graphical and Web programming. Perl programming is an essential skill for any system administrator or Web programmer, and an important one for nearly everyone else.

Because Perl incorporates aspects of more than a dozen well-known tools, experienced UNIX programmers and administrators can come up to speed on Perl very rapidly. However, because Perl is portable to all major platforms (including Windows), programmers and administrators everywhere will benefit from this high-powered tool.

Topics in this full-day class include:

	Getting started with Perl, command-line switches
	Debugging, common beginner "gotchas"
	Control flow structures, such as loops and conditionals
	Strings and numbers
	Detailed description of basic data types (scalar, array, and hash variables)
	Working with files and directories
	Binary I/O, formatted data, records
	Nested and multidimensional data structures
	References
	Detailed work on Perl regular expressions for pattern matching and substitution
	Writing user-defined functions
	Scoping issues
	Signal handling
	A light overview of packages, libraries, modules, and object-oriented programming in Perl