This chapter is a quick and merciless guide to the Perl language itself. If you’re trying to learn Perl from scratch and would prefer to be taught rather than to have things thrown at you, then you might be better off with Learning Perl, 3rd Edition by Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Phoenix. However, if you already know some other programming languages and just want to learn the particulars of Perl, this chapter is for you. Sit tight, and forgive us for being terse—we have a lot of ground to cover.

If you want a more complete discussion of the Perl language and its idiosyncrasies (and we mean complete), see Programming Perl, 3rd Edition by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant.