Welcome to The Monestary. You can learn a lot here, but there are some things you should do while you get settled in.

Open a Terminal window. Type  perl -e 'print "Hello World!\n";' That's a complete Perl program. You've just started. :)

Go to the recently added How Do I Use Perl Monks? Read. A lot.

Specifically to OS X, I've put an icon for Terminal in my Dock. The Terminal is how you interact with the Unix underpinnings of the New Mac OS, and Perl lives in the Unix part of Mac OS X. You can have more than one Terminal open at once, you can save Terminal arrangements (number of windows open, size of windows, font used, font color, background color, etc.), you can customize the living daylights out of the Terminal.

Get a Perl book. I'd recommend the Llama, or Perl for Web Site Management. See the Book Reviews section.

Enjoy. This stuff is supposed to be fun.

Update: I didn't notice that you asked this Anonymously. You should also join The Monestary. You can get a lot out of our little corner of the universe. At the very least, it let's you customize how everything looks.

In reply to Re: Perl & OS X by Louis_Wu
in thread Perl & OS X by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.