Perl has powered everything from system administration scripts to bioinformatics pipelines for over three decades, and it remains one of the most practical languages for text processing and rapid automation. Whether you are wrangling log files, parsing data feeds, or automating repetitive tasks, Perl’s expressive syntax and legendary regular expression support make it the right tool for the job.
This course walks you through Perl from the very first print statement to building nested data structures and working with files. You will begin with scalar variables, operators, and string interpolation, then move into control flow with conditionals and loops. From there, you will master Perl’s powerful aggregate data types — arrays and hashes — learning how to store, sort, slice, and iterate over collections of data.
The course then introduces subroutines for code reuse and dives deep into Perl’s world-famous regular expressions, covering pattern matching, capture groups, substitutions, and modifiers. Finally, you will learn file input and output, error handling, references for building complex nested structures, and how to leverage Perl’s extensive module ecosystem.
