Who should attend: System administrators who have never looked at Perl before or those programming in it for a short time. You must have experience in UNIX shell programming with a good working knowledge of regular expressions. A background in sed, awk, and/or C programming will prove useful.

What you will learn: Perl syntax and semantics; how to read Perl and learn from others' progamming experiences.

Have you been spending a lot of time trying to solve problems in the shell or C? Perl is an extremely powerful and robust scripting language that can help you solve problems in less time. Now ten years old, Perl is the tool of choice because of its power; plus it works on nearly every conceivable platform. Because it incorporates aspects of more than a dozen well-known UNIX tools, experienced UNIX users will come up to speed on Perl rapidly, and even programmers inexperienced with UNIX will learn UNIX through learning Perl. You will learn about these topics through detailed descriptions and numerous examples of the syntax and semantics of the language:

- Data types and data structures
- Operators and control flow
- Regular expressions
- I/O facilities
- Database access
- User-defined functions
- Writing and using library modules
- An intro to Perl's O-O programming mechanisms.

You will also hear an overview of some of the new Perl 5 modules including examples of full applications for Tk-based graphical pro gram ming, CGI programs, and client-server programming.

NOTE: While this course is based on the current release of Perl (version 5.004), it is not intended to be a detailed discourse on all advanced programming constructs now afforded by that release. It is a jump-start course on Perl for experienced UNIX programmers, not an advanced course for previous Perl programmers.

Tom Christiansen is a consultant specializing in Perl applications, optimizations, and training. He is a frequent instructor at USENIX conferences.

Tutorials at-a-Glance     Tutorial Instructors