What is Perl?

From the FAQ:: Perl is a high-level programming language with an eclectic heritage written by Larry Wall and a cast of thousands. It derives from the ubiquitous C programming language and to a lesser extent from sed, awk, the Unix shell and at least a dozen other tools and languages. Perl's process, file and text manipulation facilities make it particularly well-suited for tasks involving quick prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, graphical programming, networking, and world wide web programming. These strengths make it especially popular with system administrators and CGI script authors, but mathematicians, geneticists, journalists, and even managers also use Perl. Maybe you should, too.

Perl motto(s):	There Is More Than One Way To Do It (TIMTOWTDI)
	Easy things should be easy and difficult things should be possible

Perl is powerful: Perl includes regular expressions support, object-oriented programming, and an amazing number of functions. Perl can be used from one-liners to running Yahoo!

Perl is portable: Perl runs on nearly every system under the Sun: all sorts of Unix flavours, Mac, Windows, Amiga, VMS... The same Perl code can run on all of them.

Perl is extensible: you can write modules in Perl to do just about anything you want, then re-use those modules for other projects. The best part is that lots and lots! of modules have already been written for you, and are available on CPAN: CGI, a unified data base interface, HTML templates, network access, email, ftp, graphical interfaces ...

Perl is fun: don't underestimate this factor. Perl is fun to use. It keeps programmers happy and interested in their jobs. They don't spend their time allocating memory and keeping track of it as in C, they can focus on the interesting parts of a project. The fact that Perl is so complex and full of quirks mean that even after several years of programming they are still learning new tricks about the language. The Perl community is also very friendly and encourages people to share their coolest modules through CPAN.

Perl 101

Data Structures