Throughout this course, you will find many small programs and snippets of Perl code that you need to run and experiment with in order to understand the course text. To do that, you will need run perl on your computer.

If your system does not already have Perl installed, the next several lessons in this module will walk you through getting and installing perl on your machine.

The perl program runs on many different systems, but it runs best on the Unix-like family of operating systems (for example, Linux, BSD, HPUX, Solaris 9.0, SunOS 5.2, AIX , and so on).
If you do not have access to a Unix-like system, there are ports of perl available for other systems, including 32-bit Windows (WindowsXP and NT) and Mac OS.

There are no required books for this course.
However, you will find a list of several titles offering additional information that may be of benefit throughout the course.
You can reach the course Bookstore by clicking the Resources button on the toolbar.