All these years and I have never had the need to seriously learn perl until now. While searching for a good beginners guide I was particularly interested in a decent Computer Based Training (CBT), but that was hard to come by — at least trying to find a free one worth my while. I wanted something similar to the old DOS Unix CBT I once used when I was learning UNIX or even something to the extent of the Tcl CBT. Well, I did did not quite find what I was looking for, so instead I checked what was already available on my BSD box for learning perl:
`--> apropos perl | grep doc perlapi(1) - autogenerated documentation for the perl public API perldoc(1) - Look up Perl documentation in Pod format perlintern(1) - autogenerated documentation of purely internal Perl functions perlplan9(1) - Plan 9-specific documentation for Perl perlpod(1) - the Plain Old Documentation format Xref "POD plain old documentation" perltoc(1) - perl documentation table of contents perlvms(1) - VMS-specific documentation for Perl
What stood out to me was perltoc(1). And, it is what I used for the basis of starting to learn perl. For example perltoc(1) — like its’ name suggest will provide a brief table of contents for the rest of the perl documentation set. I used it to scan for areas that interested me about perl.
`--> man perltoc | col -bx | egrep "perl.+ -+ .*" | sed 's/^ *//' | more perltoc - perl documentation table of contents perlintro -- a brief introduction and overview of Perl perlreftut - Mark's very short tutorial about references perldsc - Perl Data Structures Cookbook perllol - Manipulating Arrays of Arrays in Perl perlrequick - Perl regular expressions quick start perlretut - Perl regular expressions tutorial perlboot - Beginner's Object-Oriented Tutorial perltoot - Tom's object-oriented tutorial for perl perltooc - Tom's OO Tutorial for Class Data in Perl perlbot - Bag'o Object Tricks (the BOT) perlperf - Perl Performance and Optimization Techniques perlstyle - Perl style guide perlcheat - Perl 5 Cheat Sheet perltrap - Perl traps for the unwary perldebtut - Perl debugging tutorial perlfaq - frequently asked questions about Perl perlfaq - this document, perlfaq1 - General Questions About Perl, perlfaq2 - Obtaining and Learning about Perl, perlfaq3 -
Once I got feet wet I decided to purchase one of the O’ Reilly Books: Programming Perl 4th Edition.And, I also found the following sites useful: http://learn.perl.org and http://perldoc.perl.org.
