This course will teach you Perl through a multi-sensory approach.

- You will hear about Perl in lectures.

- You will see Perl work through live examples.

- You will touch Perl physically by working with the dozens of downloadable working Perl programs you will have access to and that are used in the live examples.  You can use these programs to experiment with and as templates for your own Perl programming.

- You will touch Perl mentally by working on the exercises and writing your own Perl programs.

Some of the basic and intermediate level Perl skills you will learn in this course include:

* Downloading and installing Perl on your computer

* Using Perl to work with numbers and strings.  This could be used to do mathematical calculations and to manipulate strings.

* Read data into your programs (for example, .csv files, data from the keyboard, regular files, etc.), detect data patterns, and alter that data with regular expressions and various Perl functions

* Store lists of data in arrays and hashes

* Use subroutines to create larger programs and to break your programs up into manageable pieces

* Access and use ready-made code (modules)

* Create, modify, read, write, and append files.  Combine files, concatenate files.

* Use File Tests to get information that you can use to make decisions about files, much like you'd do as a systems administrator.

* Use References to Create complex data structures (e.g. arrays of arrays, hashes of hashes, hashes of arrays, and arrays of hashes). 

* See all of the above in action and practice what you learn by writing your own programs