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"A minute to learn, a lifetime to master" is the slogan for the board game Othello, but it might just as well belong to Perl. Put more accurately, the basic concepts behind Perl are simple to understand, especially for developers familiar with other programming languages. Yet, the open-ended flexibility of Perl offers seemingly endless possibilities -- which is where the exhilaration and/or intimidation usually sets in. The good news is that you don't need to master Perl to make it useful. Web developers take heart: Perl is simply a hammer, with which you can build a birdhouse or a mansion. And you don't need to be Bob Villa to build a\ birdhouse.

In this article we begin a series on using Perl in web development scenarios. To start, we ease in with a general introduction to Perl itself. The purpose of this introduction is not to send you off writing enormous Perl programs -- there are plenty of articles and books which already succeed at this. Rather, this tutorial should arm you with a basic understanding of Perl so that you can work through the examples you care about -- web interaction -- without first needing to become a Perl guru. Future articles will take more in-depth looks at Internet capabilities you can leverage from within Perl programs. This article assumes Perl 5 as the reference version of Perl, which has supplanted the popular but older Perl 4 by several years now. Developers who have some familiarity with practically any other programming language, from BASIC to Pascal to C to JavaScript, will benefit the most from this article; however, readers with no programming background can still follow along and pick up most of the concepts by inference.

Contents:

The Perl You Need to Know
Who's Afraid of Perl?