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Perl 5

Join the Perl 5 Track
Perl 5 is a highly capable, feature-rich programming language with over 30 years of development. Perl 5 runs on over 100 platforms from portables to mainframes and is suitable for both rapid prototyping and large scale development projects.
Join the Perl 5 Track
Track mentors

7 Mentors

Our mentors are friendly, experienced Perl 5 developers who will help teach you new techniques and tricks.
Track students

1,264 Students

Join hundreds of students who have enjoyed learning and improving their skills by taking this track.
Track exercises

62 Exercises

Hundreds of hours have gone into making these exercises fun, useful, and challenging to help you enjoy learning.

About Perl 5

package HelloWorld;
use strict;
use warnings;

sub hello {
  return 'Hello, World!';
}

1;

Perl v5 is a high-level general purpose programming language invented by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. It is an eclectic interpreted, procedural, loosely typed language. Its popularity peaked with the rise of the World Wide Web, though it remains widely used in Quality Assurance, IT infrastructure automation, text processing, bioinformatics and web application development, just to name a few areas. It is highly flexible, but this flexibility can have a follow-on maintenance cost.

Perl also has:

  • minimal built-in object support, but interesting 3rd party OO
  • first class functions
  • closures
  • a powerful built-in regular expression engine
  • the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), a massive library of user-contributed modules

Every well-known Unix and Unix-style operating system ships with Perl included.

Join the Perl 5 track

A tremendous learning opportunity to explore the depth of your own knowledge

Exercism is fantastic in learning new languages but that is not the extent of it. If you are a "more experienced" programmer you may have encountered impostor syndrome: the idea you don't really know what you think you know. Exercism lets you solve problems and put them in the space of open feedback which is a tremendous learning opportunity to explore the depth of your own knowledge. Even if you have been programming in a language for awhile it is worth checking into Exercism to see where you stand with current implementation practices.

Tom Leen, Portland
Relaxed. Encouraging. Supportive.

Meet the Perl 5 Track mentors

Once you join the Perl 5 language track, you will receive support and feedback from our team of mentors. Here are the bios of a few of the mentors of this track.

Avatar of Victor Goff

Victor Goff https://github.com/kotp

Find me mentoring in person or online. Everyone starts somewhere! Contact me to pair program!
Avatar of Yanick Champoux

Yanick Champoux personal tech blog

Perl necrohacker. Avid polyglot. Slightly bonkers all around.
Avatar of Zak B. Elep

Zak B. Elep https://github.com/zakame

I've written Perl 5 for quite a while now at various $WORK, and worked on quite a few FOSS projects with it as well. I'd love to help other people on learning Perl 5, as well as learn from them along the way.
Avatar of Joe McMahon

Joe McMahon https://github.com/joemcmahon

I've written Perl5 since Perl 5.6, and authored the internal comments for the Perl debugger.
Avatar of Andrew Grangaard

Andrew Grangaard https://github.com/spazm

My first professional programming was using perl, and I'm still going! Host of LA Perl Meetup. Also user of python, shell, C, ruby, haskell, rust, go, ...
Avatar of mienaikage

mienaikage https://github.com/mienaikage

A developer who first learned Perl 5 in a trial by fire, and then went on to build a programming career from it.
Fun. Challenging. Interesting

Community-sourced Perl 5 exercises

These are a few of the 62 exercises on the Perl 5 track. You can see all the exercises here.

Secret Handshake
easy
misc
Sublist
easy
misc
Simple Cipher
easy
misc
Simple Linked List
easy
misc
Allergies
easy
misc
List Ops
easy
misc
Passionate. Knowledgeable. Creative.

Meet the Perl 5 Track maintainers

The Perl 5 Maintainers are the brains behind the Perl 5 Track. They spend their spare time creating interesting and challenging exercises that we can all learn from. We are incredibly grateful for their hard work. Here are the bios of a few of the maintainers of this track.

Avatar of Monsenhor

Monsenhor Monsenhor Ricardo Filipo

Under development. Perl Monger since 1998.
Avatar of Daniel Mita

Daniel Mita dango.space

My first adventure in coding was creating userscripts by trial and error (many errors...). Somewhere down the line I accidentally found myself employed in my first coding role as a Perl developer, after attempting pair programming in Haskell.

Get started with the Perl 5 track. As with everything on Exercism, it's 100% free!

Join the Perl 5 Track