The latest major release of perl is perl5 version 34, but whatever's in /usr/bin/perl on your distro is almost certainly sufficient for learning with (some of m

The latest major release of perl is perl5 version 34, but whatever's in /usr/bin/perl on your distro is almost certainly sufficient for learning with (some of my large scale OO codebases are a bit pickier, but for scripting you're somewhat unlikely to notice the difference). Curtis Poe's Beginning Perl is a good all around introduction but I'm unsure if it's a good intro if you're aiming specifically for the text mangling side. For an uber-quick-start, I'd go with https://qntm.org/perl_en https://qntm.org/perl_en and then getting up to speed on the regexp side using the man pages linked from here: https://p3rl.org/RE https://p3rl.org/RE