Hi, Can i ask some help i want to learn perl language,can you help me where do i get started…where i can donwload the perl?is it free?
Thank you in advance.
Yes, Perl is free. You can get a Windows version here:
It has a nice simpler installer, and lets you play around with Perl on your own PC. alternatively, get a cheap hosting package that has Perl enabled (and mySQL DBs ideally too)
Thank you for the reply…I am using windows7 and wampserver is it okay to use perl in wamserver?..can i also run in my localhost?
Thank you in advance.
Hey jemz,
Why perl? Any reason?
You might want to have a look at the top couple of answers here: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/115851/is-perl-still-a-useful-viable-language
Hi pullo,
I have no reason why i choose perl,I thought it is nice to learn…maybe i pick another
Did you consider Ruby (which took a good dose of inspiration from Perl)?
Ruby is one of the easier languages to learn, it is object oriented, has a vibrant community and is a good stepping stone to Ruby on Rails.
Perl is a great language. Not my first choice since I’m a Pythonista, but there are a lot of great things being done with it and I use it occasionally for tool scripts. You don’t hear much about Perl because it’s not new and fancy, but it’s still going strong.
If you learn Perl, you’ll probably want to learn Catalyst, which is Perl’s equivalent to Rails: http://www.catalystframework.org/
It’s similar enough to Ruby and Python and used in enough similar ways that if you decide to add one of those to your toolbelt after learning it, it’ll be pretty easy.
Perl is a great language and despite it not being as trendy as some other languages right now, has an excellent community and is under constant development. http://learn.perl.org/ will give you (or anyone else who opened this post looking for similar) lots of useful information regarding installing Perl on your operating system of choice, and some tutorials to get you started coding.
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Look at Tizag tutorials and zentut.com.
They have the core elements to get started. If you want more than that you can use tutorialspoint.com. They have all functions listed. You can then create softwares and not use perl only for web.
When you get some difficulties to use Perl since there are many new stuff things on the internet you can use and install some Perl mods which then make many new and useful functions.
But mods are not a part of regular Perl and that is why you need to install them if your cpanel or control panel of the site allows you.
They have great features especially when you need to fetch content from the website or manipulate information.
Hope this helps.
Hi Jemz, great that you’re interested in Perl! It’s a powerful language, with flexibility as probably one of its strongest points, along with a great community and constant updating.
Ovid has an excellent, newish book called Beginning Perl (link is to an ebook, I have the paper book), which I can recommend. The original “Llama book” misses some important things like references, and Ovid’s book is written with Modern Perl in mind (so you aren’t led astray by things that “work” but aren’t actually a good idea in Perl land… not that the Llama book does this!).
PerlMonks is, despite how it looks (that’s free everything there, which is why there is little incentive to update that infrastructure), still the best place to go with Perl questions, but the Perl community is now pretty active on StackOverflow so that should be a safe place to ask questions about Perl in general.
++ to toddy’s link, learn.perl.org. This was set up by the community specifically to fight back against crappy old Perl code being offered to newbies, like Matt’s Scripts. You can be sure most or all of the tuts on learn.perl.org will be “modern” and best-practice Perl.
Catalyst is complex. I would totally wait on Catalyst until one has more than basic Perl under their belt.
If you want to quickly run a webserver, instead of Catalyst (which is a large, comprehensive, does-everything uber-framework) I’d recommend Dancer, which in the beginning was based somewhat on Ruby’s Sinatra (and so is also similar to Python’s Flask), a really minimal webby thing to get a webserver up and running.
Dancer 2 has made many improvements from the basics used by Sinatra, like removing globals so we can run multiple instances at once, and you know, concurrency is the hip new thing these days :P
Check out the Github but of course you can install it easily via CPAN. (well, actually, on windows I have no idea what’s easy, but I’m sure Dancer can run on a windows box?)
Another interesting framework is Mojolicious, but it’s interesting for being interesting, and also more complex than Dancer. One of its principles used to be, “what if you worked in a Perl shop but weren’t allowed to use CPAN?” I would still steer a newbie to Dancer for webby things though.
BTW, Perl6 (which is a different language within the Perl family, but still interesting) will be officially announced at FOSDEM 2015. People have been running it for a few years now but there were some core optimisations and libraries they wanted added before calling it “out”.
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