Week
1
Week at a Glance
CONTENTS
l Where You're Going
In your first week of teaching yourself Perl, you'll learn enough of the basics to write
many useful Perl programs. Although some experience in using a programming language
will be an advantage as you read this book, it is not required. In particular, you don't
need to know the C programming language before you read this book.
To use this book effectively, you should be able to try out some of the features of Perl
as you learn them. To do this, you should have Perl running on your system. If you don't
have Perl, Day 1, "Getting Started," tells how you can get it for free.
Each chapter of this book contains quiz and exercise questions that test you on the
material covered in the day's lesson. These questions are answered in Appendix A,
"Answers."
Where You're Going
The first week covers the essentials of Perl. Here's a summary of what you'll learn.
Day 1, "Getting Started," tells you how to get Perl, how to run Perl programs, and how
to read input from your keyboard and write output to your screen.
Day 2, "Basic Operators and Control Flow," teaches you about simple arithmetic, how to
assign a value to a scalar variable, and how to control execution using conditional
statements.
Day 3, "Understanding Scalar Values," teaches you about integers, floating-point