Perl

Perl (Practical Extraction Report Language) is a programming language that combines UNIX utilities and language syntax. Perl was introduced in 1987 and created to manage a variety of system administrator functions. Perl provides universal string handling functions and is used primarily for writing Web server programs. Automatically updating user accounts, processing removal requests, synchronizing databases, generating reports and synchronizing newsgroup postings are some of the main functions of Perl.

Perl is a very useful programming language that manipulates textual data, making it the language of choice for server gateways and HTTP servers. Perl is an interpreted language that utilizes a variety of text editors to create a text file that contains the source program. Perl processes the entire text file and converts it to an internal form for immediate execution. Perl is a high-level computer programming language and is known in hacker circles as being the “Swiss Army Chainsaw” of programming languages used to create live web pages via CGI.

IT professionals, programmers and developers at any level of knowledge can make use of the informative Perl articles found in this section. Data types including variables, strings, patterns and regular expressions, printing and reading output and input, decisions and looping are thoroughly discussed in a series of tutorials provided exclusively for the IT professional.