perlintro

perlintro

=head1 NAME

perlintro -- a brief introduction and overview of Perl

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This document is intended to give you a quick overview of the Perl
programming language, along with pointers to further documentation. It
is intended as a "bootstrap" guide for those who are new to the
language, and provides just enough information for you to be able to
read other peoples' Perl and understand roughly what it's doing, or
write your own simple scripts.

This introductory document does not aim to be complete. It does not
even aim to be entirely accurate. In some cases perfection has been
sacrificed in the goal of getting the general idea across. You are
I<strongly> advised to follow this introduction with more information
from the full Perl manual, the table of contents to which can be found
in L<perltoc>.

Throughout this document you'll see references to other parts of the
Perl documentation. You can read that documentation using the C<perldoc>
command or whatever method you're using to read this document.

=head2 What is Perl?

Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for
text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including
system administration, web development, network programming, GUI
development, and more.

The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient,
complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). Its major
features are that it's easy to use, supports both procedural and
object-oriented (OO) programming, has powerful built-in support for text
processing, and has one of the world's most impressive collections of
third-party modules.

Different definitions of Perl are given in L<perl>, L<perlfaq1> and
no doubt other places. From this we can determine that Perl is different
things to different people, but that lots of people think it's at least
worth writing about.

=head2 Running Perl programs

To run a Perl program from the Unix command line:

perl progname.pl

Alternatively, put this as the first line of your script: