Learning Perl: Making Easy Things Easy and Hard Things Possible / Randal L. Schwartz, Brian D. Foy, Tom Phoenix

If you’re just getting started with Perl, this is the book you want—whether you’re a programmer, system administrator, or web hacker. Nicknamed "the Llama" by two generations of users, this bestseller closely follows the popular introductory Perl course taught by the authors since 1991. This seventh edition covers recent changes to the language up to version 5.24.

Perl is suitable for almost any task on almost any platform, from short fixes to complete web applications. Learning Perl teaches you the basics and shows you how to write programs up to 128 lines long—roughly the size of 90% of the Perl programs in use today. Each chapter includes exercises to help you practice what you’ve just learned. Other books may teach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.

Topics include:

• Perl data and variable types
• Subroutines
• File operations
• Regular expressions
• String manipulation (including Unicode)
• Lists and sorting
• Process management
• Smart matching
• Use of third party modules