Perl

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What is Perl

Perl, invented by Larry Wall about 10 years ago, was originally a scripting language (much like a combination of shell-programming, sed and awk). Since the introduction of Perl5 a couple of years ago, it has evolved into a fully-fledged Object Oriented Programming language.

Perl is used extensively in massive data processing/conversion and of course Web CGI (Common Gateway Interface) programming.

I use Perl mostly in the old-fashioned way: automated data conversion, with none of that fancy OO stuff.

At work, I use Perl a lot too. Our SCM system is based on ClearCase, and all of our tooling is done in Perl since we have a mixed UNIX and NT shop. Perl is portable, flexible and very powerful so it was the obvious choice.

Perl scripts can look frighteningly complex (especially when multi-line regular expressions are used) so some people call Perl a "Write-Only Language".
Hell, if it was hard to write, it should be hard to read! ;)

CGI and Perl

Perl is probably the most popular language for writing CGI scripts. Beware though: you need to be careful when writing CGI scripts (in any language) because of the associated security concerns.

So, take a look at the following sources of information:

Idiot's Guide to Solving Perl/CGI Problems, by Tom Christiansen
Frequently Asked Questions about CGI Programming, by Nick Kew
Perl/CGI programming FAQ, by Shishir Gundavaram and Tom Christiansen
The WWW Security FAQ, by Lincoln Stein
World Wide Web FAQ, by Thomas Boutell
And finally a newsgroup, dedicated to CGI scripting (not necessarily in Perl):

comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi: Writing CGI scripts for the Web

top $Id: index.m4,v 1.3 1999/04/26 12:24:13 ed Exp $

Parts of this page were taken from the Perl FAQs, © 1997 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington Sending unsolicited (commercial) email
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