Perl is a mature, extremely flexible, general-purpose programming language, which is especially well-suited to textual manipulation. In addition to its brilliant built-in-facilities, there are vast freely-accessible libraries of Perl code to help build almost every conceivable application. And its available free-of-charge. The capabilities of Perl have been applied by a wide range of professionals in both systems support and programming fields for various applications including manipulating text and data, database access, CGI programming, HTML generation, and parsing and generating XML files. This three-day course provides a comprehensive introduction to the major aspects of the Perl programming language and a very brief overview of selected applications. It covers the basic techniques and programming structures provided by Perl5. A few topics are normally self-study, or as time allows. This is a ‘hands-on’ course with many brief, practical examples of everyday use of Perl. Follow-on: This course focuses on the language aspects of Perl. For an in-depth exploration of a range of applications for which Perl is typically applied see also Perl Applications. For further examination of Perl techniques, such as its approach to object-oriented programming in detail, see also Perl Advanced. For one organisation selected aspects of all three courses can be combined to address a very wide and flexible range of requirements.