As most Perl programmers are wont to say, there’s always more than one way. Perl’s rich feature set allows you to do the same thing using different techniques. When I first started using Perl over 10 years ago, I used it like a C programmer. As I became more comfortable with it, my Perl code became more elegant and efficient.

For the purposes of the Perl tutorials on this blog, I generally try to offer the easiest-to-understand method for manipulating data in a specific way. However, it’s not necessarily the most efficient way. It should be noted that the tutorials here are not a beginner course in Perl, nor are they complete. I have in mind some very advanced Perl programming; however, to discuss such programming, I need to be sure that readers have the necessary background.

That said, many of the initial examples here are, depending on your current level of Perl experience, either review or introduction. As well, all examples running on the commandline, unless specified. I will not generally make distinctions of operating system. For reasons I won’t get into, I use cygwin, which is like an MS-Windows-based mockup of Linux, but runs inside of Windows. To reach a wider audience, I generally stay away from Perl commands that only work in Linux/ Unix operating systems, and try to use a workaround. For example, MS-Windows versions of Perl cannot spawn child processes properly (at the time of this writing).

I know that I’ve been promising a huge list of Perl tutorials for a long time now. I’m happy to say that many of them have been written. Now that I have an advanced blogging platform in place, as well as some appropriate WordPress plugins, it’ll be easier for me to publish them. Once I get into the flow, you should see loads of Perl examples (and PHP as well).

So stay tuned. And since comments are turned on, you can ask me questions about Perl (and PHP) programming. I’ll do my best to answer them, or I’ll respond but put your question on my to-do list.