Well, it certainly isn't necessary.

The question really should be, "How helpful is it to have a Unix-y background?"

To that question, I'd reply "Very". But, OTOH, I wouldn't defer learning Perl in order to learn UNIX first.

Which kind of implies that, rather than "you have to know Unix if you're learning Perl", something more like "if you learn Perl, you'll be learning a fair amount of Unix whether you know it or not", I guess.

Unix'y knowledge, however, is useful in its own right! Especailly as so many Perl jobs will require some contact with Unix and web servers.

jdtoronto

Then again by becoming fluent in Perl you to some degree pick up *NIX knowledge. Or at least you get some exposure to it.

Perl internalizes a good bit of "The *NIX Way" to do things (e.g. file and directory handling, large bits of the POSIX API, the socket API) and by learning to use Perl you're going to look at problems through the prism of that philosophy (pardon me while I run my metaphor through this wood chipper over here a couple more times . . .). Granted while lots of Wintendo specific things don't exactly fit into the same conceptual framework (driving stuff through OLE, for instance) or work as well (processes and fork() versus a thread based model) the underlying basics translate fairly well.

It is entirely possible to become fluent in Perl now with no Unix knowledge at all.

It was possible before, too.

Perl is a 99.9% stand-alone language, unlike the bag of shells and various other tools it replaces en masse. Theoretically, one could program in Perl without knowing anything about *X other than how to log in and launch an editor.

We're building the house of the future together.

When I first began developing in Perl, I knew only the most rudimentary Unix commands (ls, cd, chmod, etc.). I got by for quite a while using CGI.pm and the DBI with that level of knowledge, largely because Perl can do most of the things that need doing with the operating system (that, and the webserver admins didn't really want me on their box anyway). Over time, though, as mentioned in other responses, I was exposed to various flavors of Unix and remedied that ignorance. In hiring, I would prefer someone who had at least a base level of Unix knowledge over someone who only knew Perl.

With regard to learning Perl, Unix knowledge is certainly not a prerequisite, although one might find that knowledge in Unix would tend to accelerate the process of learning Perl, and vice-versa.

I taught a small basic programming course to a group of middle-schoolers (5th to 7th grades) a year or so ago using Perl. Most of them had never even heard of Unix. They did fine with it on strictly Windows boxes.

OTOH, any language that has built-in functions such as grep, pipe, and tr/// (among others) clearly owes a large part of its gene pool to Unix, and increasing ones knowledge of either only serves to enchance the other. For example, I was "pretty good" with Linux for a while, but learning Perl in the last few years has really increased my feel for what goes on in the seams of the OS, not to mention my facility with certain commands.

Cheers,
Ken

Whilst I wouldn't say it was a prerequisite at all, because of its Unix heritage understanding something of Unix does help in a number of ways, firstly why some of the builtin functions are named strangely such as unlink and grep is quite obvious to someone who has worked with a Unix-like operating system, but can be opaque to others, and secondly that the Unix toolbox mindset does pervade a lot of the design of Perl and the way that people think about using it, though you find people talking about this less these days as people seem to make large applications and libraries that do more rather than lots of small things that do one thing really well and can be combined with others to perform a more complex task.

/J\

How important is a Unix background when someone wants to learn Perl?

<rhetorical question>
How necessariy is it to know how the engine in a car works in order to drive it?
</rhetorical question>

When I taught a course in Intermediate Unix for Programmers at a local college in NYC I used Perl as a programming language to demonstrate how certain Unix functions worked and allow the students to programatically manipulate those functions in an interpreted environment rather than teach them C programming.

As some folks on this thread have already pointed out Perl is portable and runs on many platforms including Windows and therefore is not tied to Unix. A readdir for instance works the aame (more or less) in Windows as it does in Linux for instance. On the Unix platform it just turns out readdir is a standard C library call. (not sure about Windows.. not my thing.)

So, no, you don't need to know much about Unix of any flavor to use Perl and no it doesn't even help much. More important is to learn general programming methodology and concepts. Knowledge of data structures is a big help but that isn't even 100% necessary. Certainly knowledge of algorithms (sorting, etc.) is a big help. That can make the difference between a fairly good piece of code and rotten code.

Just think about the joy you can experience with perl, when all you had before is a windows cmdline.

It depends on where you plan to work. If you only have PCs, then you don't have to have to know Unix.

However, you will probably come across Unix in your career so I would spend some time and get the basics down. It always looks good to say you can deal with multiple platforms.

I made the mistake of being a specialist once (Tandem) and it made me undesirable at one time.

I'd say not necessary at all. Way back when I was learning Perl, I was on a Macintosh Clone running System 7.something or other. Granted, due to participating on a MacPerl mailing list, where it seemed most on the list had unix background, gave me some exposure to unix-y things. And I think I shortly thereafter started learning Linux, which was helped by having some exposure to it through (strangely enough) MacPerl.

Would it have been helpful to have unix under my belt first? Perhaps. But I think I managed to get along fine without it, as I'm sure many others have as well.

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probably less than before: in the 5.8 series some special effort was put to make (part of) the docs less unix-centric

still, unix is good to know:

Well I don't think its essential, but its certainly very useful and it gives you an understanding of where its all coming from and helps you get in the mindset of the people behind it, and the many cpan modules out there you can install.

I have played around on Unix and Windows Perl, but started on Unix and I think it definately helped my understanding of the principles involved.

Without retreading what other people have posted, I will comment on Perl coming from a Windows background.

When I started with Perl, I was trying to do account manipulation and managing file and directory structures. Most of the functions built into Perl were designed with a *NIX system in mind (for example permissions). In addition, the way permissions worked in WinNT were also more complicated than the standard *NIX version which ended up as a handicap; I had to depend upon the basic WinNT command line utilities; That said those utilities were pretty horrible to learn and use.

So one of the things that I learned Perl was focused upon *NIX systems when doing administration.

It also pointed out to me that Windows had serious limitations of its own. There were few toolkits that effectively dealt with administration and those that did were poor. I moved from thinking alot of problems I encountered with Windows were because of my ignorance to Windows was just a plain mess.