ActivePerl FAQ - Availability and Installation
ActivePerl-faq1 - Availability and Installation
Getting, installing, and using Perl.
Perl is a scripting language widely used for system administration and
programming on the World Wide Web. It originated in the UNIX community and
has a strong UNIX slant, but usage on Windows has grown rapidly. ActivePerl
is a quality-assured binary distribution of Perl for popular UNIX platforms
and Windows.
perl (small 'p') is the program used to interpret the Perl language.
Extensive online documentation is included with Perl itself. You can read
the documentation with the perldoc command, as in perldoc
document_name. You should start with the perl document
and the perlfaq document. For information on other ways of
accessing the Perl documentation (including HTML versions of this
documentation), see Where can I get
documentation on ActivePerl?.
To get more information about Perl, check out these URLs:
There are several good books about Perl. The premier book on ActivePerl
for Windows is Learning Perl On Win32 Systems By Schwartz, Olson,
and Christiansen (O'Reilly & Associates, 1997). This is the Gecko book,
and has a picture of a gecko (little chubby lizard with big toes and a smile)
on the front cover.
For general perl, two books to consider are Programming Perl, 3rd
Edition, by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen and Randal L. Schwartz (O'Reilly
& Associates, 1996) and Learning Perl, 3rd Edition, by Randal L.
Schwartz (O'Reilly & Associates, 1993). These are referred to by Perl
enthusiasts as the Camel book and the Llama book, respectively.
If you are new to Perl and there are any terms mentioned in this FAQ that
you don't get, try one of the above resources. See the perlbook
document that comes with Perl for more information.
ActivePerl is available from the ActiveState home page.
To download ActivePerl from ActiveState, look in this directory:
http://www.ActiveState.com/ActivePerl
ActivePerl is a complete, self-installing distribution of Perl based on
the standard Perl sources. It is distributed online at the ActiveState
site.
"Perl for Win32" generally refers to ActivePerl for Windows.
For complete installation information, see the ActivePerl Installation Guide.
The Perl source code includes complete instructions on building Perl. You
can obtain the latest Perl source from:
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/latest.tar.gz
Once you extract the source, read the README file for
instructions on compiling Perl.
This FAQ was originally assembled and maintained by Evangelo Prodromou. It
has been revised and updated by Brian Jepson of O'Reilly & Associates,
David Grove, David Dmytryshyn, David Sparks and Michael Smith of
ActiveState.
This FAQ is in the public domain. If you use it, however, please ensure
that you give credit to the original authors.
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ActivePerl FAQ - Availability and
Installation
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