I think this will highly depend on how machine-readable your recommendations are, and how much prose there is. Perl can read various file formats, such as Excel, MS Word, text files and some versions of PDF formats to extract the information stored in it.

One large issue will be extracting the recommendation once you have the raw text. This will border on "sentiment analysis" unless you can come up with a sure-fire list of phrases that indicate a strong recommendation.

If you have never programmed before, I recommend that you use a programm which your faculty is familiar with.