IS&T RCS Tutorial - Perl with Pipeline Example, Part One

This tutorial will give you an introduction to the Perl language through code snips and examples. In order to help put Perl in a more relevant context, we will share a real life research pipeline for cancer research, which demonstrates Perl’s many powerful features. The pipeline is able to support the bioinformatical data management of the entire life cycle of research, including data acquisition and consolidation, NGS sequence alignment and data analysis, as well as the result bookkeeping, etc. You do not need to have any prior Perl or other programming language experience to take this tutorial. All levels are welcome. This first part of the tutorial will start by sharing the basics of a pipeline example to showcase what Perl can do. Then we will go back to fundamentals to go over all the main features of Perl with several sets of hands-on examples. We will cover topics such as the Perl runtime environment, Perl data types and structures, file I/O, regular expressions (pattern matching), as well as some advanced features, such as subroutines, packages and modules, the POD system, and the Perl debugger.