1. Why Perl?

Perl is a great, usable language, that is worth learning. This website should convince you: small, but practical code examples are provided, whether or not with comprehensive annotations. To mention some Pros:

• It’s stable and actively developed
• It’s very, very fast.
• It’s a language that is easily to understand (indeed, easy for ‘VisualNeo Win’ developers)
• It has a massive documentation, tutorials, books etc.
• It has more than 200.000 modules to invoke and to extend your Perl script (1). So why reinvent the wheel? In addition, most of the modules provide example code!
• It has a large community. And e.g. on reddit.com and stackoverflow.com many questions and answers on Perl programming problems can be found.
• The sympathetic concept: TIMTOWTDI (2), meaning “there is more then one way to do it” (in contrast to Python where there is only one way to do things).
• Regular expressions are Perl’s core business. This means that text processing is a very powerful feature.

$concat = $a.$b;
$concat = "$a$b";
$concat = join ", $a, $b;
$concat = sprintf("%s%s",$a,$b);
$concat =~ s/.*/$a$b/s;