What's Perl good for? A short answer is system programming and text processing. What makes it good? Its concise syntax, regular expression engine, extensive function and module library, and excellent documentation. For system programming it's a complete programming language so it can do much more than shell scripts can. For text processing it simplifies data extraction and output generation. This tutorial explores some of Perl's key features and advantages. It's also available in pdf.

The tutorial is built around three small programs showing Perl at work. The code and associated files are available through links in the html version of this document, so you can download and run them yourself. Perl is big, and this tutorial is necessarily limited, so there's lots more to find in the extensive resources listed at the end. Among important topics not covered here are subroutines and modular programming, essential elements of larger Perl programs.