This 5 day course (based on Perl 5.8.0) provides students with the necessary knowledge and skills to develop effective Perl scripts.

The Perl course curriculum consists of the following essential Perl activities:

Module 1 is an introduction to Perl, the Perl interpreter/compiler, an introduction to variables, basic operators, printing and comments, followed by a number of Perl command line options.

Module 2 is an introduction to scalar variables. A scalar is an individual data item, either a string or a numeric. (Context is king in Perl).

Module 3 introduces basic control structures like if, while, for, do, foreach and until, plus the necessary loop control statements of redo, next and last.

Module 4 gives us an insight into one of Perl's most powerful features, the array. There is also an introduction to several of Perl's array functions like pop, push, shift, unshift, split, join, sort and grep.

Module 5 introduces regular expressions - feel the power...

Module 6 provides useful examples on how to use the hash data structure and looks at a number of key hash functions like keys, values and each.

Module 7 introduces files and file handles. There is a discussion on how Unix and Perl manage their all important interface.

Module 8 gives a breakdown of how subroutines and modules interface. It's one of the key benefits of Perl 5.

Module 9 provides more information on the Perl and Unix interface and looks at how we access Unix commands and manipulate their output.

Module 10 introduces an overview of how Perl works on the World Wide Web with CGI.