The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a repository of over 250,000 software modules and accompanying documentation for 39,000 distributions, written in the Perl programming language by over 12,000 contributors. CPAN can denote either the archive network or the Perl program that acts as an interface to the network and as an automated software installer. Most software on CPAN is free and open source software.
Larry Arnold Wall is an American computer programmer, linguist and author. He is best known for creating the Perl programming language and the patch tool.
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".
Randal L. Schwartz, also known as merlyn, is an American author, system administrator and programming consultant. He has written several books on the Perl programming language, and plays a promotional role within the Perl community. He was a co-host of FLOSS Weekly.
Programming Perl, best known as the Camel Book among programmers, is a book about writing programs using the Perl programming language, revised as several editions (1991-2012) to reflect major language changes since Perl version 4. Editions have been co-written by the creator of Perl, Larry Wall, along with Randal L. Schwartz, then Tom Christiansen and then Jon Orwant. Published by O'Reilly Media, the book is considered the canonical reference work for Perl programmers. With over 1,000 pages, the various editions contain complete descriptions of each Perl language version and its interpreter. Examples range from trivial code snippets to the highly complex expressions for which Perl is widely known. The camel book editions are also noted for being written in an approachable and humorous style.
Learning Perl, also known as the llama book, is a tutorial book for the Perl programming language, and is published by O'Reilly Media. The first edition (1993) was authored solely by Randal L. Schwartz, and covered Perl 4. All subsequent editions have covered Perl 5. The second (1997) edition was coauthored with Tom Christiansen and the third (2001) edition was coauthored with Tom Phoenix. The fourth (2005), fifth (2008), sixth (2011), and seventh (2016) editions were written by Schwartz, Phoenix, and brian d foy. According to the 5th edition of the book, previous editions have sold more than 500,000 copies.
Robert M. Love is an American author, speaker, Google engineer, and open source software developer.
PerlMonks is a community website covering all aspects of Perl programming and other related topics such as web applications and system administration. It is often referred to by users as 'The Monastery'. The name PerlMonks, and the general style of the website, is designed to both humorously reflect the almost religious zeal that programmers sometimes have for their favorite language, and also to engender an atmosphere of calm reflection and consideration for other users.
Intermediate Perl is a book about the Perl programming language by Randal L. Schwartz, brian d foy and Tom Phoenix, published in 2006 by O'Reilly Media. It was released as a retitled second edition of Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules (ISBN 0-596-00478-8) by Schwartz and Phoenix, published by O'Reilly Media in 2003 to favorable reviews. A second edition of Intermediate Perl was released in 2012.
Raku is a member of the Perl family of programming languages. Formerly known as Perl 6, it was renamed in October 2019. Raku introduces elements of many modern and historical languages. Compatibility with Perl was not a goal, though a compatibility mode is part of the specification. The design process for Raku began in 2000.
Pugs is a compiler and interpreter for the Raku programming language, started on February 1, 2005, by Audrey Tang.
brian d foy [sic] is the former publisher and editor of The Perl Review, a magazine devoted to Perl and co-author of several books on Perl including Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl and Mastering Perl. He is also the founder of Perl Mongers, the founder of the White Camel Awards, a frequent speaker at conferences including The Perl Conference and YAPC. He is the author of multiple Perl modules on CPAN and maintains the perlfaq portions of the core Perl documentation. He was a partner at Stonehenge Consulting Services from 1998 to 2009.
Sean Michael Burke is a Perl programmer, author, and linguist. He was a columnist for The Perl Journal from 1998 and has written several dozen Perl modules for CPAN, as well as books for O'Reilly Media.
The fat comma is a syntactic construction that appears in a position in a function call where a comma would usually appear. The original usage refers to the ")letters:(" construction in ALGOL 60. Newer usage refers to the "=>" operator present in some programming languages. It is primarily associated with PHP, Ruby and Perl programming languages, which use it to declare hashes. Using a fat comma to bind key-value pairs in a hash, instead of using a comma, is considered an example of good idiomatic Perl. In CoffeeScript and TypeScript, the fat comma is used to declare a function that is bound to this.
Test::More is a unit testing module for Perl. Created and maintained by Michael G Schwern with help from Barrie Slaymaker, Tony Bowden, chromatic, Fergal Daly and perl-qa.
Chromatic is a writer and free software programmer best known for his work in the Perl programming language. He lives in Hillsboro, Oregon, United States. He wrote Extreme Programming Pocket Guide, co-wrote Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook, is the lead author of Perl Hacks, and is an uncredited contributor to The Art of Agile Development. He has a music degree. Also, he has contributed to CPAN, Perl 5, Perl 6, and Parrot.
Rakudo is a Raku compiler targeting MoarVM, and the Java Virtual Machine, that implements the Raku specification. It is currently the only major Raku compiler in active development.
Perl::Critic is a static code analysis system for the Perl programming language. Perl::Critic is available as a source-code distribution on CPAN. It comes with a commandline tool, perlcritic, which can check Perl source code files and report on the code quality therein. Perl::Critic has an extensible architecture that allows the programmer to choose from many "policies" which enforce different Perl programming styles and tastes. The default policy is largely based on the recommendations in the book Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway.
PerlTidy is a tool written in the Perl programming language to do static code analysis against code written in that same language. It uses either command-line switches or configuration files to reformat Perl scripts so they comply with specified coding rules. The default configuration is an approximation of the Perl Style Guide.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Perl programming language:
