Perl is breath of fresh air - a powerful scripting language with a short syntax and an impressive range of facilities that make for quick and effective coding in applications from heavy data handling to web page interaction, and from report generation through to systems admin tasks. But with that impressive range of facilities, you get the ability to write code that's hard to enhance and maintain, just as you get the ability to write code that is clean and efficient. So this is a language that you really need to learn from an expert rather than self-teach.

At Well House Consultants, we run:

• A 5 day Learning to program in Perl / Perl Programming course that covers programming and Perl fundamentals, the more powerful "core" structures of the language that are required in most applications, and some of the more common advanced topics. Suitable for both newcomers to programming and those with some prior programming too.

• An advanced course covering object orientation in Perl, database access, and handling huge data sets - Perl for larger projects

• A further advanced course covering Perl's use on the Web.

• Our Regular Expression Course takes you deeper into Perl's powerful string handling facilities - one of the features that's brought this language to prominence.

If you've a group of three or more delegates who wish to learn about Perl at the same time, a Specially Run Courses course can be arranged, and for larger groups we can also run a Private Courses course at your offices. Such courses are tailored to meet your requirements - please contact us to discuss the detail of what you need. With Perl, we also have a huge range of extra training modules for niche requirements, so private courses aren't limited in topics.

We use Perl ourselves as the data tool behind this site, and our Opentalk Forum and daily update are both written in the language. That's in addition to a number of contract and bookkeeping scripts we've written over the years.

Perl was written by Larry Wall, who's still very much at the helm today. A new version - Perl 6 - is undergoing development at present and there are major factors that will come into play once a stable version is released. Be assured that we're already well informed about these and our current training will guide you towards futureproofing your code