Perl is an interpreted programming language created in 1987 that provides powerful text processing capabilities. It is portable, supports rapid prototyping, and follows the philosophy of "there's more than one way to do it". To use Perl, it needs to be installed which is usually already done on Linux and Mac systems. Common Perl data types include numbers, strings, and scalar variables to store single values. Perl includes typical operators for mathematics and strings, and conditional statements like if/else to control program execution based on comparisons.