Get a Job Doing Perl
Perl penetrates bottom-up. A programmer comes to a company, he knows Perl and uses it to write his scripts. When given a task to write an application for which Perl is a good choice, he quickly uses Perl to write it quickly. The management is impressed. And next thing you know, there is a lot of Perl code in the organization that needs to be maintained, and more employees are trained in Perl, and start to like it, and the company needs more Perl programmers to replace the ones that moved elsewhere, or to develop more rapidly.
As a result, Perl has become very popular. Not only that, but a lot of open source code was written in it and was made available online. It is used by such very large, very busy, sites as Amazon.com, Slashdot and Live Journal and by countless of smaller sites. Furthermore, it often plays a large part behind the scenes.
We need you!
Get a job.
There are plenty of jobs there looking for good Perl developers. You can find them in:
Learn Perl
Are you already a programmer, and you now need to learn Perl? Do you have little or any programming experience and want to start programming with Perl? Welcome aboard!
Perl is an easy language to get up to speed with, and the more you learn about it the more you discover, and the more your expressive power grows. Furthermore, its richness, psychology, power and availability make it excellent for beginning programmers.
To learn Perl see our list of online tutorials, read a book for people with previous knowledge of programming online (some are available online free-of-charge) or buy a different book. Then browse the rest of the site.
What can I do with Perl?
Almost anything. Traditionally, Perl has been used for writing system administation scripts. It is still the solution for that which is the most reliable and ubiquitous, and probably is still very commonly used for that on UNIX systems. Its qualities of interfacing to all the host operating system system calls, and providing good abstractions make writing portable Perl scripts relatively easy, and they are more reliable than shell or awk, and can be made more modular as Perl is a more powerful language.
When the Web revolution came and web sites cropped, Perl 5 was there to power the Web. Commonly referred to as "the glue of the Internet", Perl 5 was used to write server-side scripts using CGI and other technologies, and even write many large-scale applications. Despite facing some competition from other languages recently, like PHP or Python, Perl 5 is still a very popular choice for that.
Many other uses were later found for Perl: writing network servers, GUI programs, Bio-informatics, Quality Assurance and Testing, and web automation.
