A few weeks ago I got an interesting email from someone at Udemy. They were looking for someone to write a beginners Perl tutorial that they would make available for free on their web site. I think I wasn’t the only person that they got in touch with but, after a brief email conversation, they asked me to go ahead and write it.

It turned out to be harder that I thought it would be. I expected that I could write about 6,000 words over a weekend. In the end it took two weekends and it stretched to over 8,000 words. The problem is not in the writing, it’s in deciding what to omit. I’m sure that if you read it you’ll find absolutely essential topics that I haven’t included – but I wonder what you would have dropped to make room for them.

But eventually I finished it, delivered it to them (along with an invoice – hurrah!) and waited to hear that they had published it.

Yesterday I heard that it was online. Not from Udemy (they had forgotten to tell me that it was published two weeks ago) but from a friend.

Unfortunately, some gremlins had crept in at some point during their publication pipeline. Some weird character substitutions had taken place (which had disastrous consequences for some of the Perl code examples) and a large number of paragraph breaks had vanished. But I reported those all to Udemy yesterday and I see they have all been fixed overnight.

So finally I can share the tutorial with you. Please feel free to share it with people who might find it useful.

Although it’s 8,000 words long, it really only scratches the surface of the language. Udemy have added a link to one of their existing Perl courses, but unfortunately it’s not a very good Perl course (Udemy don’t seem to have any very good Perl courses). I understand why they have done that (that is, after all, the whole point of commissioning this tutorial – to drive more people to pay for Perl courses on tutorial) but it’s a shame that there isn’t anything of higher quality available.

So there’s an obvious hole in Udemy’s offerings. They don’t have a high quality Perl course. That might be a hole that I try to fill when I next get some free time.

Unless any other Perl trainers want to beat me to it.

Oh, and please let me know what you think of the tutorial.