You may attend all three of the classes in this series, or any combination. Classes are free, but you must sign up.

Perl is a general-purpose programming language. It was originally developed for text manipulation and is now used for a wide range of tasks, particularly in bioinformatics and biological research. Relatively simple to learn, Perl provides a means to set up complex workflows for biological research. This class will introduce the basic variable syntax of Perl, specifically scalars, arrays, and hashes, as well as filehandles, in order to input and output information.

Control structures provide a means to control the flow of a particular programming process. Although much can be done in linear code with just variables and filehandles, control structures enable processes to make independent decisions. In this class we will learn about if, while, for, and foreach statements. We will integrate what we previously learned about Perl variables and filehandles and will look at simple examples of biological Perl scripts.

The term "regular expressions" refers to specific motifs for a given string. Regular expressions are widely used to search and manipulate large bodies of text based on certain patterns. Perl has extremely powerful syntax for regular expression applications, which lends itself well to bioinformatics and biological applications. Much of the raw data being held in biological data hubs constitutes amino acid and nucleotide sequences along with sequence annotation. Perl regular expressions are an ideal way to search and organize these large datasets quickly.