SiIntroProgPerl


I wanted to learn Perl, because
  i wanted to master a scripting language,
    and Perl is standard scripting language of Debian.
  i wanted to learn to use regular expressions,
    and Perl's regexp capabilities are better than those of any other language
    (what you can do with grep's regexps, for example,
     is a small subset of what you can do with perl's regexps).

So i studied perl's manpages,
  which are informative, but do not together form a Perl manual,
  and edited them into a manual that describes Perl.

I think it describes Perl reasonably completely, without bloat or braindamage,
  and frivolous enough to be pleasantly readable by those interested in it's subject.

As i wanted result to be usable as a reference,
  (as i soon found i couldnt remember everything i read in manpages),
  i wrote it in form of a systematic tutorial.
I tried to never use any concept before explaining what that concept means
  because not being able to explain something usually meant that i didn't understand it.
As this includes concepts that are common to all programming languages,
  this perl manual turned into a manual from which one can learn to program.

This manual is not perfect yet, but already quite usable ;
I still need to describe quoted strings earlier in it,
  and description of Perl's builtin network-related commands needs to be split off into a separate document.

here is latest version of textfile (ca. 640 kB)
here is same file compressed with gzip (ca. 200 kB)

There are older versions of textfile, with control files and .deb etc. at www.siward.via.freeler.nl