The 21st century offers more high-level languages than you could shake a stick at. And for mathematical use, we already have Mathematica, Matlab, Pari/GP, etc. What can one more language do for you? I will discuss the following: * Why people use Perl; why some people love it and why others hate it. * The minimum you need to know to write and run simple Perl programs, even if you haven't used such languages before. * Text manipulations and regular expressions. Sounds boring? What I mean here is how to write a script that automatically converts your raw data into LaTeX tables, in the format you want, so you don't have to do it by hand. * Numerical processing, e.g. estimation of derivatives and integrals and ODE solvers. I will give some simple examples (a dozen lines of code or so).