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Perl began as a text-processing language, an extension to the popular but limited awk language. Perl evolved into a general-purpose programming language popular with web developers, database developers, and many other types of programmers. Perl is very strong at processing large amounts of data, including manipulation, analysis, validation, conversion, formatting, and reporting. It offers complete libraries for database access, web development, graphics programming, and other environmental requirements. This five-day course teaches students the foundations of using Perl effectively in many application environments. In addition to teaching the basics, such as data types, operators, flow control, and subroutines, the course goes into great detail on using arrays and hashes for complex data manipulation, regular expressions for advanced text processing, and Perl's object-oriented features for modern OO programming practices. Students write many complete Perl programs in this course, which ensures that when they return to work they can become productive immediately.