Is Perl hard to learn?

    
    No, Perl is easy to learn for two reasons.  
   
    The first reason is that most of Perl is derived from existing tools
    and languages, ones that many people who turn to Perl already have
    some familiarity with.  These include the C programming language, the
    UNIX C library, the UNIX shell, sed, and awk.  If you already know
    these somewhat, Perl should be very easy for you.

    The second reason that Perl is easy to learn is that you don't have to
    know every thing there is to know about it in order to get good use
    out of it.  In fact, just a very small subset, mostly borrowed from C,
    the shell, and sed, will be enough for most tasks.  As you feel the
    need or desire to use more sophisticated features (such as C
    structures or networking), you can learn these as you go.  The
    learning curve for Perl is not a steep one, especially if you have
    the headstart of having a background in UNIX.  Rather, its learning
    curve is gentle and gradual, but it *is* admittedly rather long.

    If you don't know C or UNIX at all, it'll be a steeper learning curve,
    but what you then learn from Perl will carry over into other areas,
    like using the C library, UNIX system call, regular expressions, and
    associative arrays, just to name a few.  To know Perl is to know 
    UNIX, and vice versa.