Contents

1 Introduction

1.1 The capabilities of Perl
1.2 A brief history of Perl
1.3 The perl development cycle

2 Basic Output (The "Hello World" program)

2.1 More about semicolons

3 Expressions

3.1 Operators and Precendence
3.2 Functions
3.3 More about strings

3.3.1 Escape Sequences

4 Variables

4.1 "+=" and friends

5 Input
6 The For Loop
7 Conditionals

7.1 Numerical Comparison Operators
7.2 String Comparison Operators
7.3 Boolean Operators
7.4 True Expressions vs. False Expressions
7.5 elsif

8 The While Loop

8.1 last and next

9 Arrays

9.1 The ',' operator
9.2 The foreach loop

9.2.1 The for keyword and the .. operator

9.3 Built-In Array Functions
9.4 The x operator