An Undergraduate Course in Perl: An All Purpose Programming Language

Perl programming is a skill that students will not fully appreciate until they have mastered it.Perl is best known as a scripting language.Even people who know how to program in Perl generally only think about using it for automating other processes.Perl is also known for its powerful text manipulation capabilities through the use of regular expressions.However, Perl's greatest strength is its versatility.This versatility allows for students to learn about webdevelopment through Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts, Object Oriented Practices, and regular expressions all in the context of one language.The flexibility of Perl allows students to incorporate for previous individual assignments into a single application.One of the later course assignments is to parse in different sports teams rosters from their web pages.Once the rosters are parsed in, the program must allow the user to search for different players by name, height, weight, team, or number.Students also learn how to use Perl's text manipulation to take output from one program and prepare it for input to a different program.Even though Perl programming is not a skill that companies advertise for, it is a used in many companies and can help students keep their future jobs.Former students have found their Perl programming skills extremely useful not only in other Computer Engineering courses but in Business classes and industry.