Day 1. An Introduction to Perl

Greetings and welcome to Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days! Today, and for the next 20 days, I'll be your guide to all things Perl. By the time you finish this book—or at least by the time you put it down—you should know enough Perl to accomplish just about anything you'd like to do, and to converse intelligently with other Perl programmers.

Today we're going to start with some basic information to ease you into working with Perl. Today's lesson is kind of short; just enough to give you a little background and to get you started with some simple Perl scripts. In particular, you will

• Learn some background on Perl: what it is, who created it, who's working on it now.

• Find out why you should learn Perl (reasons besides “my boss told me to.”)

• Explore some actual Perl code, so you can get an idea about how Perl is written and run (and be prepared for the rest of this week's lessons).

And so, without further ado, let's get started. Week one, Chapter one, section one—Onward!