Perl Primer

This primer is mostly a compilation of information found in two books that I highly recommend:

"Beginning Perl" by Simon Cozens, which can be found online at http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/. This is a free book, and a great introduction to Perl programming.
"Perl programming for Biologists" by D. Curtis Jamison (Wiley-Liss publisher). This is a small book with many examples/problem sets related to biology. I like the way it is structured.
"Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics", by James Tisdall (O’Reilly publisher)

Chapter	Title	Content	Handout	Solutions to exercises
0	Introduction	What is Perl? How to install Perl on your computer Your first program: "Hello World!"	PDF file	Solutions: Word file PDF file
1	Scalar Variables	Scalar variables: definition Numbers: Representation Computation Strings: Basic operations: concatenate, reverse Regular expressions: substitute, translate, match Defining STDIN	PDF file	Solutions: Word file PDF file
2	Lists, Arrays and Hashes	Lists: representations and manipulations Arrays: Definition Adding and removing elements: push, pop, shift, unshift, splice Other operators: sort, reverse From arrays to strings, and back: join and split Hash (or associate array): Definition Usage Adding and removing elements	PDF file	Solutions: Word file PDF file
3	Control structures	Logical expressions Conditionals: if, elsif, else Loops: for, foreach, while	PDF file	Solutions to exercises 1 to 3: Word file PDF file Program for exercises 4 to 6: DNA2Prot
4	Input/Output	Passing parameters to program File handles The input operator	PDF file	Solution to problem: program SeqAlignFasta

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