- Step 1. Free Copy
Perl is an open source programming language, available at no charge.
You can get it from several sources, but my recommendation is the
ActivePerl
distribution from ActiveState.
- Step 2. Online Tutorials
The documentation that is released with the Perl installation
file is great for reference use, but is not designed for beginners.
There are also several books on the market (I'll get to those in a few
paragraphs) which are significantly better.
I recommend that beginners start with a short, online tutorial.
The benefit of such short tutorials is that you get exposed to the basics
without being overwhelmed by more detailed, complex learning sources.
When I was learning Perl I read over 50 online tutorials, thinking that each
might give me some insight that the other tutorials failed to provide. What I
found was that most of the tutorials covered some, but not all of the questions
that would confuse a beginner - which is the primary reason I wrote my own
tutorial.
A very few of the tutorials did, however, cover beginning Perl adequately for
me to include them in the following recommendation:
I suggest that you read all of these - front to back - and don't skip pages.
Type in all the examples and run them until you understand them.
Save what you type in for later use. These beginner tutorials have some
very basic code which you will use over and over again.
Once you've read the tutorials, read them again. You'll be surprised
at how much information you pick up with each re-reading. I found that
by the time I read it a third time, including printing it out and
using a high-lighter on the text for key sections, that I had pretty
much absorbed all that the tutorial had to offer.
- Step 3. Know Your Tools
Imagine hiring a carpenter and when you hand him a hammer he says
"What's this for?". You owe it to yourself and your employer to know
what Perl tools are available and how to use them.
Your primary tools are the Perl language statements, HTML coding, UNIX
commands and FTP software.
To help in sorting through the various Perl functions, I've created a
Perl Function Summary
that groups Perl functions according to the type of task they can
perform. Grouping functions this way can really help you fix in
your mind what Perl can do in each group.
- Step 4. Online Scripts
I've already mentioned that you should type in every line of whichever
tutorial or books you chose to use in learning Perl. I suggest
that you also go download some short scripts from some of the online
sites which offer free scripts. Go through each of the samples line
by line. Look for lines of code that you will be able to re-use in
your own scripts.
I suggest my own snippets as a good
way to start. When picking out scripts, try to get annotated code to
help you understand what the author of the script intended.
- Step 4. Perl FAQs
There are about a half dozen Perl FAQs out there. I suggest that
you read them all, but not until you've gone through some of
the tutorials and have a handle of Perl's capabilities. I've
gone through all the FAQs I can find and have found that they
have good information but are not focussed on the needs of
beginning programmers.
The more you know about Perl before you read the FAQs, the more you'll
get from the FAQs. Unfortunately there is no one single FAQ these days,
nor are all of them kept current.
- Step 5. Books
Online tutorials can only take you so far. They're too short to
provide the in-depth discussion that you can find in books. Books
not only provide greater depth of coverage, but they provide the
ability to take the materials with you - allowing you to read and
learn wherever you are - on the road, on a plane, or waiting in
the doctor's office.
Start with these three books, all from
O'Reilly:
- Learning Perl
- Perl Programming
- Perl Cookbook
If you look these over but they're not what you want, be sure to
take a look at my Perl Books page.
It lists about a dozen publishers who offer Perl-related
book titles. Many of those are excellent books, but you'll find that
the ones form O'Reilly are typically the best sellers.
- Step 6. Perl Documentation
Perl comes with thousands of pages of documentation, all for free
and installed as parts of the standard installation files -
including an HTML version. Spend time wandering around the
documentation, paying close attention to the examples.
Because you can access the content of documentation from the
command line, you'll find that this can be the fastest way to look
up a syntax that you cannot quite remember.
