Chapter 1
Getting Started
CONTENTS
l What Is Perl?
l How Do I Find Perl?
m Where Do I Get Perl?
m Other Places to Get Perl
l A Sample Perl Program
l Running a Perl Program
m If Something Goes Wrong
l The First Line of Your Perl Program: How Comments Work
m Comments
l Line 2: Statements, Tokens, and <STDIN>
m Statements and Tokens
m Tokens and White Space
m What the Tokens Do: Reading from Standard Input
l Line 3: Writing to Standard Output
m Function Invocations and Arguments
l Error Messages
l Interpretive Languages Versus Compiled Languages
l Summary
l Q&A
l Workshop
m Quiz
m Exercises
Welcome to Teach Yourself Perl 5 in 21 Days. Today you'll learn about the following:
l What Perl is and why Perl is useful
l How to get Perl if you do not already have it
l How to run Perl programs
l How to write a very simple Perl program
l The difference between interpretive and compiled programming languages
l What an algorithm is and how to develop one