Contents
2. Course Requisites and Goals
This course presumes participants have elementary programming experience in a
procedural programming language such as C, Pascal, or Basic; and access to a
system with Perl 4 or Perl 5 installed, such as MU Information & Access
Technology Services's SHOWME and SGI systems.
By completing this course and its homework, you should be able to:
- Locate reference materials and other resources related to Perl;
- Express fundamental programming constructs such as variables, arrays,
loops, subroutines and input/output in Perl;
- Understand several concepts relatively idiosyncratic to Perl, such as
associative arrays, Perl regular expressions, and system interfaces;
- Program in Perl for data manipulation, file maintenance, packaging or
interfacing system facilities, and for "Common Gateway Interface" Web
applications. CGI resources will be examined in more depth in a subsequent MU
Information & Access Technology Services Short Course.
To keep this a short course, we won't explain object-oriented
concepts and some other facilities appropriate for large projects. Perl, perhaps
more than any other computer language, is full of alternative ways to do the
same thing; we tend to show only one or two. We will try to stimulate by
examples of useful bits of code, results, and questions. Turn to the reference
materials for further explanation.
