Perl Training

A Short History of Perl

In 1972, the C programming language was released by Bell Labs. In 1973 Ken Thompson created a utility around Global Regular expressions called GREP (Global Regular Expression Print). In 1977 Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan developed the computer language called AWK which was named after their initials. In 1978 Stephen Bourne released a UNIX shell called "sh" (Bourne shell) that evolved after System V and BSD.

In 1987, Larry Wall released version 1.000 of Perl. He developed Perl because of his displeasure with sed, C, awk and Bourne shell. He wanted a single language that combined their advantages and reduced the disadvantages.

After many revisions, Perl 5 was released in 1994. It was a complete re-write and the first version to offer hard references, modules and object oriented constructs.

Perl Today

The most current version is Perl 5.8.x.

Development has begun on Perl 6.0; however the language syntax is not backwards compatible. Although Perl 5.8 was not built to be object oriented, the addition of OOP technology is functional in the current version. The strength of this version and the amount of legacy Perl 5.8 code indicates that Perl 6 may never have the following that Perl 5 does.

Perl has gained popularity as a language for writing server-side scripts for web servers. Programming perl scripts is even more popular among Linux system administrators. Perl can also be used to manage database information and to develop GUI applications.

Today, Perl is one of the most popular programming languages. It is very fast and portable. Unlike C (which is a compiled language) and shell languages (which are interpreted), Perl is both compiled and interpreted. When a Perl script is launched, it is quickly compiled into a byte-code form and then executed from that.

Perl also has a large Standard Library of useful functions, and a rich set of open source add-ons you can download from CPAN. You can even write your own, and contribute them to CPAN for everyone to use!

How Much Does Perl Cost?

Perl is free and comes standard with many operating systems.

ActiveState Perl can be installed for no cost on Windows based computers.

Why Should You Learn Perl?

If you are currently programming in C or C++, you can increase your productivity with Perl scripting. If you are currently writing shell scripts, you can increase your execution speed and available language features with Perl scripts. If you want to create GUI applications, then Perl/Tk would be great for you. If you want to write a system daemon or do interprocess or network communications, learn Perl - it has great methods to do that.

Most Perl training courses are 5 days long. Fastech Learning Center will enable you to be productive with Perl in just 3 days. If you already know Perl you might appreciate our Advanced Perl training course instead. Our hands-on, instructor led, high tech industry tested training will give you the skills you need to build powerful Perl applications in just a few days and for a reasonable cost. Your improved programming skills will save money in the long run.

You can spend many non-productive hours trying to teach yourself Perl programming. You will end up with many misconceptions and holes in your knowledge. The result will be inadequate code.

See Also

Check out our curriculums for detailed course suggestions depending on your background and interests.