Objective

Perl (Practical Extraction Report Language) is an interpreted language that can arbitrarily examine document or binary file to extract information for producing tables. If you know UNIX, Perl’s objective is replacing the UNIX original language that combines its tools, sed and awk, with shell script in order to collect data for table production.

Larry Wall, who is Perl’s designer, designs it on the premise of practice (here practice refers to one complete language that can be easily and efficiently used) instead of designing a beautiful language whose syntax is elegant, i.e. it is composed of fewest syntactic elements. Thus, once you master it, you will deeply love Perl’s practice and convenience.

Perl comprises the best features among C, sed, awk and sh. Its syntax is also very close to shell script because some Perl’s symbols are consistent with shell script. Of course it’s much better to know awk and sed already. Larry Wall says, “Perl is designed for lazybones.” If Perl is not easier and simpler than other languages, perhaps few people are willing to learn new programming language.

Learning direction

Perl has much extensive application in open source code, e.g. Yahoo and Amazon. Its strong word processing ability and its Regex tool on data processing are beyond other programming languages. In addition to commerce, the scope of Perl’s application overseas is extended to government agency and academic institute as well. After seeing these application cases, maybe you can consider to apply Perl to your current problems. Perhaps these trivia questions will be immediately resolved.

Future career

• Hacker
• Web programmer
• Biological technology researcher
• Database administrator (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, MySQL and etc.)
• Other specific engineer
• Assistance engineer
• MIS engineer
• Software/firmware tester