RE: Perl Programming within Debian

["David Christensen" <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com>]

rocky wrote:
> I'm thinking of learning Perl Programming.

Get this book first, read it, and do all of the exercises:

    http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnperl4/index.html


After that, get these books as references:

    http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/index.html

    http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlckbk2/index.html


For CGI scripting, this is the classic:

    http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/stein/

but it is dated.  I'm working through it and writing updated scripts:

    http://apache.holgerdanske.com/cgi-pm-book/

I have some others, but haven't studied them in a while.


> Can any of you help me get started on how to programming Perl in
> Debian?

Install these Debian packages (as root):

    # apt-get perl-doc
    # apt-get perlindex


Then use the perlindex program to browse the documentation (as a user):

    $ perlindex learn


> I mean what is the file extension for the perl? Is it .cgi?

For command-line scripts, I don't use any extension so that they are
invoked just like any other command-line program.


For CGI scripts, I use .cgi for CGI scripts that run in the traditional
CGI way and .pl for CGI scripts run with mod_perl Apache::Registry
acceleration (the later is 10x faster, but there are subtle differences
that break some scripts and I haven't figure out all the details yet).


> Do I need to use any compiler for perl?  what is the best choice?

A standard Debian installation includes the Perl interpreter:

    2006-12-30 09:32:09 dpchrist@p3600 ~
    $ perl -v

    This is perl, v5.8.4 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
    ...

which includes the Perl debugger (-d command line option).


> How can I test my work(For instance in PHP programming I can use
> Firefox browse to the file I want to see the output)?

For command-line scripts, you can run them from the command line with or
without the debugger.


For CGI scripts, you can run them as above and/or have your web server
run them.  The web server can either call the command-line Perl
interpreter, load a Perl interpreter module (mod_perl), or have a Perl
interpreter already compiled in.  I prefer the last choice:

    apt-get apache-perl


> I was trying to search on the net and it did give me lots of results.

Yup.  I'd recommend starting here:

    http://www.perl.org/


FYI the best place for asking Perl language questions is the usenet
newsgroup:

    comp.lang.perl.misc

and for Perl CGI questions:

    comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi


HTH,

David