It's common, at least where I come from, for people to have a bad impression of Perl, or not to know anything about it at all. I believe it's due to it being extremely high level and flexible, where almost every funny character in your keyboard has a function, and cases where you can actually write Poetry in it or have some masochistic fun with Obfuscation.

Since I'm the closest we have resembling a Perl SME in my team, I've been asked to put together a quick Perl Crash Course. I was going to prepare a presentation in PPT, but since I'm a disaster with that tool, I thought of doing it here and sharing it with everyone else. It's also an opportunity for me to learn more...

So enough with the mumbo jumbo and let's get to it!

Please note that this a is work in progress. Feel free to subscribe to my blog to get fresh updates.

Perl Crash Course TOC:

1. Sticks and Stones
   1. Introduction to Perl
   2. Getting it Installed on...
      1. ...Windows
      2. ...*nix
      3. ...Cygwin
   3. Variables and Data Structures
      1. Scalars
      2. Arrays and Lists
      3. Hashes
      4. References and Complex Data Structures (CDS)
      5. Gettin' jiggy wit it
   4. Basic Regular Expressions
   5. Control Structures
   6. Basic I/O
   7. Subroutines
   8. File and directory tests and manipulation
2. Even Apes Use Tools
   1. Packages, Namespaces, and Lexical scopes
   2. Pragmas, Perl Modules, and CPAN
   3. Object Oriented Perl
   4. Some handy modules
      1. Data::Dumper - Who's afraid of CDS?
      2. Mime::Lite - e-mail anyone?
      3. DBI - The Database Interface
      4. Spreadsheet::* - Yes, we do Excel!
      5. DBD::Chart - Who would've thought...
3. Homo Sapiens Sapiens
   1. Inter Process Communication
   2. eval this
   3. TMTOWTDI for control structures
   4. Tied Variables && MLDBM

If you have any comments or suggestions on the table of contents, please leave a comment. I'd like to add more stuff especially to the Homo Sapiens Sapiens section.