Introduction: What is Perl?

Perl is a twenty-year-old scripting language designed for managing text. It is cross-platform, running on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, Windows, and probably many more operating systems. It comes pre-installed on most operating systems today, and is used for managing server tasks, formatting documents, and filtering data. It may be the most-used programming language on the web, and has sometimes been called the duct-tape of the Internet.

If you’re familiar with the use of duct tape, you’ll have an idea of what Perl is used for. Perl is not the prettiest of solutions. But it works. It holds together things that would otherwise never hold together, and is a useful tool for creating quick solutions to thorny problems. There is an elegance in duct tape, an elegance in the solutions of the trenches. When something is broken it needs to be fixed.