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+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.
projects / urisagit/Perl-Docs.git / blobdiff