Others have pointed out Learning Perl and The Perl Cookbook as good sources. You ought to be able to cobble something together in a few hours if you know how to skim effectively. You might want to look at Picking Up Perl, as it's online and free.

Some people have suggested CPAN, and generally I agree that CPAN is the way to go when you need to do something. However, for a complete newb and for this task, I'd suggest sticking with straight forward DIY parsing code. The CPAN options will all require understanding data structures and references and such--not to mention module installation. Skip that crap, it's more work than it's worth at this point. At first you take baby steps. Learning to use CPAN will allow you to run, but you are definitely not ready yet.

Post your code when you get stuck.


TGI says moo


In reply to Re: Need crash course in PERL! by TGI
in thread Need crash course in PERL! by cbrackin

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.