PERL is very well suited for text parsing and meets the needs of Genomic and Proteomic Projects. Much of the data in the available Genomic and Proteomic Databases and the data output from the various free and commercially available bioinformatic software programs need to be altered to the specific needs of the companies and individual projects or scientific experiments. You can download the latest version of PERL (Perl 5.10) at http://www.perl.com or from http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/ for Unix and Win32 platforms.
Bio-Perl http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/Main_Page project provides modules for specific genomic analysis. Version 1.6 was released on Jan 2009, so it is kept well updated. One can go through the Bio-Perl tutorials to learn about the toolkits components.
“How PERL saved the human genome project”, a historic article by Lincoln Stein makes interesting reading.
Bioinfoworld 
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