Who should attend: Programmers with backgrounds in C programming, shell scripting, or both. Previous exposure to Perl is beneficial, but not essential. Experienced UNIX programmers and administrators will come up to speed on Perl very rapidly, but programmers on other platforms can also learn and use Perl.

Designed to be programmer-friendly and platform-neutral, Perl is a high-level, general-purpose programming language that makes medium-hard tasks easy and seriously non-trivial tasks possible. Now moving into its second decade, Perl has become the language of choice across all platforms for programmers engaged in rapid prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, data base access, graphical programming, and World Wide Web programming.

Topics will include:

	Use of detailed descriptions and examples of the syntax and semantics of the language
	Data types and data structures
	Operators and control flow
	Regular expressions
	I/O facilities
	Database access
	User-defined functions
	Writing and using library modules
	An easy intro to Perl's object-oriented programming mechanisms

NOTE:  While this course is based on Perl version 5.004, it will not provide detailed discourse on all advanced programming constructs now afforded by that release. It is a jump-start course on Perl for experienced programmers, not an advanced course for Perl programmers.