By John Callender
This page is designed to help novice programmers learn the Perl programming language. Specifically, it's designed to help them learn enough to run CGI scripts on a Unix Web server.
This page grows out of my own experience. When I started out on the Web I was new to Unix, and had no formal training as a programmer. I wanted to create dynamic pages for my Web site, though, and everyone said Perl was the way to go. They were right: It was the way to go. It sounds trite to say that "Perl changed my life," but that's basically what happened.
Still, it was an uphill battle. In particular, many of the resources for learning Perl seemed to assume that I was already an experienced programmer, or at least an experienced Unix user. I've made some assumptions in these pages, but not those assumptions.