In addition to time, patience, and a beverage of your choice…

This book is primarily intended to teach you how to program in Perl. But in order to do that we want you to first learn some Unix skills. You will need access to a computer that is capable of running the Perl programming language and a Unix or Linux Operating System (OS). You will also need to use a code editor program to write your Perl scripts. We’ll talk about what specific software to choose in the next chapter, but first let’s consider the bigger picture, including a brief overview of how Unix and Linux differ and whether that even matters.

What computers can run Perl?

As a programming language, Perl is platform agnostic. You can write (and run) Perl scripts on just about any modern computer. We will assume that >99% of the people reading this use a PC (running Microsoft Windows and/or Linux), or an Apple Mac. A small proportion of you may be using some other type of dedicated Unix platform, such as a Sun or SGI machine. None of this really matters too much. All of the Perl examples that we demonstrate in this book should work on any machine that you can install Perl on.