Introduction to Programming
Using Perl

Author: Don Colton

Download the Free Book, First Edition
(ipup.pdf, 10 Jun 2009, 342p, 1.1 MB)

The first edition is frozen. The second edition is under development. New material is being added there.

Second Edition
(ipup2.pdf, 2010)

This free book is designed to support an introductory (100-level) college course that meets for about forty hours during a semester or quarter. We do not assume any prior programming knowledge or experience. We only assume a small amount of algebra.

This book is different from many other books because of its focus on the question why. Many other books focus on the how of programming, expecting that the why will be obvious. For the authors themselves and for advanced readers, maybe the why *is* obvious. Fish are the last to discover water. They take it for granted.

I illustrate with stories and examples that try to motivate different topics. I try to answer the question "who cares?" In the end, I hope that you will come away with a better concept of what is behind the scenes that makes each topic interesting or useful, and not merely a skill at doing something that you are not yet sure you care to do.

Computers are fast, powerful, and inexpensive. They make great slaves. The challenge is how to instruct them. Programming is the process of telling computers how to act.

This book teaches the fundamentals of programming. When you complete this course, you will (a) be writing useful programs that run on the desktop, (b) be writing useful programs that run on the Web, and (c) know whether programming is fun for you and worth pursuing with bigger projects and/or additional languages.

The book is typeset using LaTeX. The author is Don Colton, Associate Dean in the College of Business, Computing, and Government at Brigham Young University Hawaii.