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[urisagit/Perl-Docs.git] / perladvantages

You have a lot of popular dynamic languages to choose from including
Ruby, Python, Java and Perl. Each one has its own style, advantages and
quirks. This document is meant for newcomers to Perl to see why it is a
language worth knowing by all modern programmers.

CPAN

The CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) has been the crown jewel
of Perl for decades. It is a public repository of over 10,000 modules of
Perl that are free and easy to download and use. If there is a protocol,
file format, algorithm, library or almost anything else, there will
likely be a CPAN module that handles it for you. Modules range from very
popular ones like LWP (for fetching web pages), to File::Slurp (which
reads/writes/modifies whole files) to obscure modules that are used by a
few developers in a niche field. CPAN isn't a dusty mausoleum
either. Over 2/3 of the modules have been uploaded or updated in the
past year. There are also several supporting services for automatic
testing of modules against a matrix of Perl versions and platforms and
for reporting bugs and making feature requests. 

Community

One of the joys of programming in Perl is becoming a member of the
worldwide Perl community. There are over 1 million Perl developers on
planet earth and they work together in many ways to help each other. The
Perl community hosts conferences (YAPC and workshops), develop and
maintain Perl (p5P), write modules for CPAN, support developers with
websites and mailing lists, run local user groups and much more. You can
find someone in the Perl community in your town, country or on the net
who can help you figure out which module to use, how to use a feature
that is new to you, and how to contribute backto the community.  To read
much more about this and find the community area of interest to you, see
the document perlcommunity

Regular Expression Engine

Regular expressions, commonly called regexes, are a very powerful and
common way to match and extract strings from larger pieces of text. They
used in many areas including parsing, validation and transformation. The
ironic thing is that many other languages claim to have 'Perl compatible
regular expressions' (PCRE). Many do use a PCRE library for that. But
none are really compatible with Perl's as it keeps getting improvements
and new features that keep it the king of the hill. Perl also integrates
regexes into the language in a more concise way which reduces the amount
of code you need to get a job done.

Documentation

Perl has some of the best and most useful documentation around. There
are tutorials on many topics, solid reference manuals, documents on
special topics for experts and more. You can read these documents on
your system or at http://perldoc.perl.org which also has a smart search
engine. There are also navigation documents such as 'perl', perlblurb
and perltoc that help you quickly find the topics that interest you.