Perl Mini-FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions, FAQ)

People often ask me how I taught Perl - which books I read, which sites I visited, and so on. Many people believe that Perl has a complex syntax, and therefore they don’t want to be afraid of learning it. In this FAQ, I would like to share my opinion on the Perl language.

I heard that Perl is an outdated language and now nobody writes it. Is it so?
No not like this. Perl is used by system administrators (or simply advanced users) to automate routine work. Perl is used to create websites. It also creates regular applications, as in any other programming language.

Regarding the age of the language - Perl was created in 1986 and has been actively developed and changed since then. Perl currently supports modular and object-oriented programming, regular expressions, etc. - in general, it keeps up with the times.
')
Perl programmer vacancies announcements appear with a high frequency, while the salary level is usually significantly higher than that of C or Java programmers. However, by the time you read these lines, the situation could have changed, so it is better to conduct your own research in this direction, visiting, for example, rabota.ru.

What good is perl?
I would highlight the following advantages of Perl over other programming languages:

• Programs written in Perl (as is the case with any other scripting language) work equally well under different operating systems.
• Often the fact that another programming language (for example, PHP) occupies ten lines of code can be written in Perl in one line.
• If you are faced with some task, take a look at CPAN. Most likely, someone has already decided it. You just have to download the module and read the documentation for it.

, Perl . ?
Perl Java PHP. , . Perl , , , . , :

my @arr = ("aaa", "bbb", "ccc");

— :

my @arr = qw/aaa bbb ccc/;

, Perl , - PHP, , — Perl. grep sort, , PHP.

Perl?
. . Google — .

— « Perl» «Perl: », — . . , Perl. - , ( , 2006- — , Perl ) 1000 .

Perl, (, vingrad.ru) - ru_perl.

UNIX Perl!
— Perl Windows. ActivePerl. ActivePerl http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/ . — .

. ?
, , .

-, « ». , , ( PHP), , ( ).

-, Perl . , ( , 3D ), Perl . . Perl .

-, Perl , , , , . , PHP — , , — . Perl , , .

PHP ?
PHP , . , . , .

PHP, CMS, Drupal Joomla. Perl , WordPress — Movable Type. , , .

Update: Perl, - : http://eax.me/perl-basics/