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:

1. Locate reference materials and other resources related to Perl;
2. Express fundamental programming constructs such as variables, arrays, loops, subroutines and input/output in Perl;
3. Understand several concepts relatively idiosyncratic to Perl, such as associative arrays, Perl regular expressions, and system interfaces;
4. 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.