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PERL consistently ranks in as one of the top 15 programming languages in the world. It is a versatile programming language commonly used for text processing, text parsing, regular expressions, and system administration tasks. Whether you are a beginner developer look to start a career as a PERL programmer or an experienced coder looking to add a second (or third) programming language to your toolbelt, online classes are a popular option to begin your journey. With that in mind, this tutorial rounds up some of the best online courses to learn how to program in PERL, with options ranging from beginner to expert.

PERL Programming for Beginners from Udemy

The PERL Programming for Beginners course is, as the name suggests, designed for beginning programmers or experienced programmers that want to learn PERL as a second language. It is also a great course for system administrators looking to automate common tasks via some PERL scripts.

The online programming course is made up of 70 lectures that weigh in at 7 hours and 42 minutes in length. It covers topics that include:

• PERL basics
• How to work with Scalar data
• How to work with arrays and lists
• How to use subroutines
• Using input and output
• Using hashes
• How to use regular expressions for text processing and more

In addition to the topics listed above, this gentle introductory course has students complete a PERL project, which consists of an automated text analyzer you can use for your resume or part of your portfolio.

You can learn more about this online course by visiting PERL Programming for Beginners.

Learn PERL 5 by Doing It from Udemy

Different students learn in different ways and I am a firm proponent of learning by doing, which is why the Learn PERL 5 by Doing It course makes our list. This developer class is twice as long as our previous listing, consisting of 14.5 hours of on-demand video, meaning you can take the course around your busy schedule. Upon finishing the course, students will receive a Certificate of Completion that makes a great addition to your resume or LinkedIn profile. Among the different subjects covered include:

• How to install PERL
• An overview of several free IDEs and code editors
• How to create your first “Hello, World!” style program
• How to download text and images programmatically
• How to work with arrays and check if files exist
• How to read from files and the basics of regular expressions
• How to write to files and replace text within a file
• How to use wildcards in regular expressions
• Grouping and matching text
• Using escape sequences and numeric quantifiers
• Web scraping and parsing XML
• How to work with databases
• How to build web applications
• Basic Sysadmin tasks

By the end of this course, students will be well-versed in how to build web scrap and text parsing tools and understand the basics of both system administration with PERL and web applications. You can learn more about this course by visiting its Udemy listing: Learn PERL 5 by Doing It.

Taming Regular Expressions: Complete Guide to Regex from Udemy

Some courses focus on a specific concept of programming, letting developers hone in and become experts on a given topic. Text processing, as stated, is one of the things PERL does best, and the Taming Regular Expressions: Complete Guide to Regex course from Udemy highlights that fact. In addition to learning how to use PERL for creating regular expressions or Regex, students will also learn how to use complimentary programming languages like Python, JavaScript, Rust, Java, C#, C++, Kotlin, Swift, and Ruby to further understand regular expressions.

This course is setup for developers that have general experience, but no knowledge of regular expressions (or very little). It aims to take students from beginner level to expert level in the arena of using Regex. Some of the many topics covered in this 8 hour online course include:

• Introduction to, and history of, Regex and Regex tools
• Working with literal characters, metacharacters, and special characters
• Using carets
• Basic regular expression concepts
• How to install PHP, Python, and Visual Studio Code
• Password and email matching
• Advanced and expert level regular expression and text processing

By the end of this online course, students will learn how to use regular expressions in real-world settings – not simply as theoretical concepts. You can learn more about the course and its curriculum by visiting its page on Udemy: Taming Regular Expressions: Complete Guide to Regex.

Fundamentals of Unix and Linux System Administration from Udemy

While not 100% targeted at PERL developers, we include the Fundamentals of Unix and Linux System Administration course from Udemy for two reasons: first, it does have several sections that do teach PERL scripting. Second, the course is devoted to those that want to learn to administrate systems, which is something PERL is especially good at.

The course is pretty thorough, consisting of 109 lectures at a total length of nearly 24 hours. It covers the following topics of interest to future Sysadmins:

• Package management
• Shell scripting
• Bash, Perl, and Python scripting
• Booting and shutting down systems
• User access control
• How to control processes
• Working with the File System
• How to add new users
• Working with storage
• Network management and debugging
• Security
• Performance analysis
• Web hosting
• TCP/IP Networking

The above is just a short list of the many topics the course covers. To learn more, head on over to its Udemy listing: Fundamentals of Unix and Linux System Administration from Udemy.

Final Thought on Online Courses to Learn PERL

In this programming tutorial, we highlighted some of the best online courses to learn PERL. The courses listed above are aimed at beginners looking to learn their first programming language, more experienced developers wanting to add more languages to their skill set, and system administrators that want to automate administrative tasks. The choice of which course you choose will depend highly upon your career path, intent, and personal preferences, but you certainly can’t go wrong with any of the choices we provided here.