As we write this, Perl 5 is probably the version you want. It’s the widely installed and used language that people mean when they say simply “Perl.” It’s going to be the interesting and most used version for a long time. It’s the one you want if you don’t know why this paragraph is here.

We can’t give you all of Perl in just a few hours. The books that promise to do that are probably fibbing a bit. Instead, we’ve carefully selected a useful subset of Perl for you to learn, good for programs from 1 to 128 lines long (an arbitrary number), which end up being about 90% of the programs in use out there. And when you’re ready to go on, you can get Intermediate Perl, which picks up where this book leaves off. We’ve also included a number of pointers for further education.

Each chapter is short enough for you to read in an hour or two. Each chapter ends with a series of exercises to help you practice what you’ve just learned, with the answers in Appendix A for your reference. Thus, this book is ideally suited for a classroom “Introduction to Perl” course. We know this directly because the material for this book was lifted almost word for word from our flagship “Learning Perl” course, delivered to thousands of students around the world. However, we’ve designed the book for self-study as well. brian provides additional exercises and detailed answers in a separate companion book, Learning Perl Exercises.

Perl lives as the “toolbox for Unix,” but you don’t have to be a Unix guru, or even a Unix user, to read this book. Unless otherwise noted, everything we’re saying applies equally well to Windows ActivePerl from ActiveState and Strawberry Perl and pretty much every other modern implementation of Perl.

Although you don’t need to know a single thing about Perl to begin reading this book, we recommend that you already have familiarity with basic programming concepts such as variables, loops, subroutines, and arrays, and the all-important “editing a source code file with your favorite text editor.” We don’t spend any time trying to explain those concepts. Although we’re pleased that we’ve had many reports of people successfully picking up Learning Perl and grasping Perl as their first programming language, of course we can’t promise the same results for everyone.

Is This the Right Book for You?

This is not a reference book. It’s a tutorial on the very basics of Perl, which is just enough for you to create simple programs mostly for your own use. We don’t cover every detail of every topic, and we spread out some of the topics over several chapters so that you pick up concepts as you need them.

Our intended readers are people who know at least a little bit about programming and just need to learn Perl. We assume you have at least some background in using a terminal, editing files, and running programs—just not Perl programs. You already know about variables and subroutines and the like, but you just need to see how Perl does it.

This doesn’t mean that the absolute beginner, having never touched a terminal program or written a single line of code, will be completely lost. You might not catch everything we say the first time you go through the book, but many beginners have used the book with only minor frustrations. The trick is to not worry about everything you might be missing and to focus on just the core concepts we present. You might take a little longer than an experienced programmer, but you have to start somewhere.