Introduction to Perl Scripting

This introductory level course presents the basic concepts and capabilities of the Perl program scripting language. A number of complete programs are used to illustrate how to use Perl to perform various data processing and system administration tasks.

Target Audience:
Technical Users, Applications Programmers, and Systems Programmers.

Recommended Prerequisites:
Basic user level knowledge of an operating system such as UNIX or Windows. Experience in Shell Programming or C-type languages will be benefical but not mandatory. Working knowledge of any standard text editor will be required.

Course Objectives:
After completing this course, the student should be able to:

• Specify the features of and uses of Perl

• Describe and use literals and variables

• Use Perl arrays and associative memory.

• Describe and use programming control structures

• List and use operators

• Format and print program output

• Perform basic file manipulation

• Access and manipulate directory information

• Create and use functions

• Describe and use special regular expression characters

• Use Perl to perform UNIX like operations

Key Topics:

• Perl Language Introduction

• Scalar Data

• Arrays and list data

• Control Structures

• Hashes

• Basic I/O

• Regular Expressions

• Command line arguments

• Functions

• File handles and file tests

• Directory access

• Data transformation

• Database manipulation