Goals for this Hour

In this hour, you learn what tools are available with the standard Perl distribution to help you develop smart, fast programs.

In this hour, you learn about

• Exchange, a demonstration currency translator written in Perl

• Checking code quality with -w

• Online Perl documentation and information

• Other useful Perl commands

In the preceding lesson we used a simple FTP front-end program as an example of what you can do in a few lines of C. This lesson will offer a different program, one that lets you do easy currency translation to prepare you for travel overseas.

Perl isn't included with every UNIX implementation, surprisingly. If you don't have it, or your version of Perl is earlier than 5.0 (try perl -v to find out what version you have), then go to http://www.perl.org/ to find out about downloading a newer version.