MAC to Linux
A Glimpse at Perl (originally written especially for MAC Alliances)

• Getting started with perl is easy as illustrated by: The Hello Cruel World Program, The Personalized Program, The Very Personal Program, The Broken Record Program, and The Shrink Program.

• Perl has a lots of cool features such as regular expressions (as used in The Pig Latin Translator), hashes (once called associative arrays) and objects, and much more, melded together in an almost magical way.

• There's a highly developed, people oriented perl culture with a people friendly philosophy. Perl is used by many different types of people all over the world.

• Very possibly you can use perl on your web site. It's widely used for writing CGIs and many other tasks on web sites. You can definitely use perl on your MAC (which has its very own Macperl).

• There are many good uses of perl, but it's especially good for anything where text is important.

• So why perl?

  • It's easy to learn, has cool features and has a cool culture,
  • It's available for your MAC and for most platforms.
  • And you can use it for CGIs and lots of cool stuff.

• There are good resources for learning perl.

If you want to consider something lighter, try Perl Pre-History.

After-Thought

Perl is extra special on UNIX systems including Linux. The integration with the command line and the access to system functions is exceptional. Since Perl is a favorite among UNIX system administrators, there are likely to be lots of examples of perl scripts to look at.