Basically I want to know what is Perl and what are its basic requirements to learn it?

Answer 1

Well, I’ll start off my response a bit oddly … Why Perl? ;-)

If you’re looking for a solid general purpose scripting language suitable for just about any data processing task, I would tend to steer you toward Python. If this is your entry point into programming, I would absolutely suggest Python over Perl. 

Having said that, Perl is a powerful scripting language that has some very cool features, but its syntax and general organization can appear a bit strange at first. (I used awk quite a bit years ago – Perl always reminded me of awk).

In 2020, you won’t find large portions of enterprise applications being implemented in Perl, but it’s still one of the go-to languages for data integration/transformation and “large data set” processing – string manipulation, pattern matching, basic file operations – it’s all there and fairly easy to leverage. Back during the outset of the WWW, Perl was commonly used to code CGI scripts to generate dynamic web content before Application Servers became commonplace. 

I would approach learning the features of Perl as follows – building a set of well commented scripts that you can build on: 

1.      Variable types – there are 3 main ones – simple scalar values, indexed arrays and associative arrays (or hashmaps). 

2.      Built-in operators and features

3.      Defining functions: the function/subroutine is its unit of modularity – Perl offers Object Oriented features, but that’s not how most developers use Perl (Again, go with Python if you’re implementing an Object-Oriented design).  

4.      File access / manipulation functions

5.      String manipulation / regular-expression techniques

That will get you started … go to “perl org” – there’s some great well organized content there to get you jumpstarted.