f you are looking for a free Perl tutorial that is packed with everything you need to know to get startedon Perl programming, look no further. Presenting before you is probably the most comprehensive Perltutorial on the Web, the product of two years of diligence seeking reference from related books and Websites. Perl is a programming language that is offered at no cost. So wouldn’t it be nice if you can also learn itat no cost? Packed with some background knowledge of programming in C++ and Visual Basic, when Istarted learning Perl several years ago, I couldn’t even find one good online tutorial that covered at leastthe basics of the Perl language and was free. Most Perl tutorials I could find merely covered the verybasic topics such as scalar/list assignment, operators and some flow control structures etc. On the otherhand, although I have accumulated certain levels of experience in a number of programming languages,the official Perl manual pages are quite technical with whole pages of jargons that I was not very familiarwith.

As a result, the book “Learning Perl” written by Larry Wall, the inventor of the Perl language, nat-urally became the only Perl textbook available. The O’Reilly Perl Series present the most authoritativeand well-written resources on the subject written by the core developers of Perl. While you are stronglyrecommended to grab one copy of each if you have the money, they are not so cheap, though, and that’sthe motive behind my writing of this tutorial — so that more people with no programming backgroundcan start learning this stupendous and powerful language in a more cost-effective way.