Perl is a programming language which can be used for a large variety of tasks. Both Perl interpreters and Perl documentation are freely available for Unix, MVS, VMS, MS/DOS, Macintosh, OS/2, Amiga, and other operating systems. (On Windows systems, Perl can be used in DOS command line mode.) A typical simple use of Perl would be for extracting information from a text file and printing out a report, or converting a text file into another form.

The name "Perl" was derived from the expression "Practical Extraction and Report Language". But Perl provides a large number of tools for quite complicated problems, including system administration tasks, which can often be programmed portably in Perl.

Perl has powerful string-manipulation functions. It combines features and purposes of the C language and many command or scripting languages. For such reasons, Perl looks rather odd on first sight. But once you have learned Perl, you will be able to develop programs in Perl faster than in most other languages.

Perl has become immensely popular for programming handlers for World Wide Web forms and generally as glue and gateway between systems, databases, and users.

Perl is typically implemented as an interpreted (not compiled) language. Thus, the execution of a Perl program tends to use more CPU time than a corresponding C program, for example. On the other hand, computers tend to get faster and faster, and writing something in Perl instead of C tends to save your time.

For a whole lot more information on the history and development of Perl, check out the offical Perl web site at www.perl.com.

Now, on with your first lesson in Perl programming!