Started in 2001, I am glad to announce the official release of First Edition of the Perl 5 Tutorial today.

You can download by clicking on the link above. Also, I am glad that this document is also available for download from the mirror at geek.scorpiorising.ca. My grateful thanks go to "Scorpio Rising" for his generosity in providing server resources to help disseminate this document.

This release is virtually identical to RC3, except with a few last-minute modifications and corrections applied. Also, I have changed the default font to Minion, which is more condensed so that the number of pages generated has dropped to 241 from 245 in RC3, and is not due to any removal of content.

The official release of the First Edition also marks the commencement in preparation of the Second Edition. It is expected that this forthcoming edition will exhibit a significant expansion in terms of coverage, and is scheduled to complete before 2008. Please click here to read on how you may contribute to this project.

As always, please don't forget to give me some feedback by emailing me or posting on my Feedback Forum!

• ADDED summaries for each chapter and a few review questions
• COMPLETED a few unfinished parts
• Miscellaneous Fixes

This is the LAST Release Candidate before the final release of the First Edition, expected to be released in early 2004. I am glad to announce that all topics planned for the First Edition have been completed in this release. Before the official release, if time allows, I will add more Web links and review questions after each chapter.

I decided to temporarily take down the HTML version for the time being because it is already a very old and incomplete version of which its quality does not in any way resemble that of the official PDF version. In order to avoid giving readers a negative sense of quality I decided to take it temporarily offline, until I can find a long-term solution that lets me prepare both the HTML and PDF versions from the same source base.

Please take the time to read through this tutorial and give me some feedback. This is the FINAL chance of getting any necessary changes into the main text before the final release!

• ADDED appendix "How A Hash Works?"
• ADDED chapter "Runtime Evaluation & Error Trapping"
• ADDED section "Constructing Complex Regular Expressions"
• ADDED index
• Miscellaneous Fixes