Perl

Short for Practical Extraction and Report Language, Perl is a programming language developed by Larry Wall, especially designed for processing text. Because of its strong text processing abilities, Perl has become one of the most popular languages for writing CGI scripts. Perl is an interpretive language, which makes it easy to build and test simple programs.

Perl can run under most operating systems, but is most widely used under Unix.   Classes can be taught in a Windows environment (for those with no experience with Unix) with the accumlulated skills easily ported to Unix (or other operating systems.)


Intro to Perl (4 days)  Table of Contents

Course Description: Perl has been described as C, awk, sed, and shell programming all wrapped into one language. In this intense, 4-day, hands-on programming course, you will learn how to take advantage of Perl's power through examples and extensive exercises. Arrays and hashes, I/O, regular expressions, subroutines, and complex data structures are covered in depth. The course also introduces object-oriented programming in Perl, as well as UNIX multi-tasking and Perl sockets programming.

Audience: Programmers and system administrators.

Prerequisites: Fundamentals of UNIX. Experience in a high-level programming language, such as C, C++, or Java, is strongly recommended.

Advanced Perl (4 days)  Table of Contents

Course Description: Perl has evolved from its beginnings as an eclectic scripting tool for UNIX administrators into one of the most popular, influential, and widely used computer languages in history. In this course, you will learn how to fully utilize the Perl programming language.

Audience: Application programmers, system administrators, web-site authors, webmasters, and UNIX/NT power users.

Prerequisites: Perl Programming and Perl application development experience. Full comprehension of the extending and embedding material will require some C or C++ programming experience.


Perl /CGI for Web Development (3 days)  Table of Contents

Course Description: This course bridges the gap between using HTML to create static Web pages and using Perl CGI scripts to create dynamic Web pages. The course emphasizes using the Perl 5 CGI library routines to process HTML forms by providing extensive working examples and by students writing applications to illustrate the concepts presented. This course is not intended to be a substitute for a Perl programming course.

Audience: Web site developers wanting to create interactive Web pages.

Prerequisites: Familiarity with HTML forms. Programming experience is required. Basic UNIX skills and the ability to use vi or a basic text editor are also required.