Perl is a well-established programming language that has been developed through the time and effort of countless free software programmers into an immensely powerful tool that can be used on practically every operating system in the world. Perl started out as the "Swiss army knife" of computer languages and was used primarily by system administrators, but over time it's grown into a robust language used by web-developers and programmers worldwide. It's also a great way to learn programming techniques and develop your own style of coding. The motto of Perl is "There's more than one way to do it", but this book aims to take you through them all. We'll take you from installation, through the core language elements - regular expressions, references, modules and the like - and on to basic applied techniques. You'll see how to access and work with databases in Perl, write CGI scripts to generate web pages, and beyond. Coverage is bang up to date, using Perl 5.6 in all our examples, and there's a handy reference section in the back.
What does this book cover?
- Complete tutorial in Perl on Windows and UNIX
- Making use of online Perl resources like CPAN
- First principles in programming and the Perl syntax
- Working with files and databases
- Writing web pages in Perl
- Using Perl as an object-oriented language
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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| Peter Wainwright | Peter Wainwright is a developer and software engineer specializing in Perl, Apache, and other open-source projects. He got his first taste of programming on a BBC Micro and gained most of his early programming experience writing applications in C on Solaris. He then discovered Linux, shortly followed by Perl and Apache, and has been happily programming there ever since.
When he is not engaged in development or writing books, Wainwright spends much of his free time maintaining the Space Future website at www.spacefuture.com. He is an active proponent of commercial passenger space travel and cofounded Space Future Consulting, an international space tourism consultancy firm. |
| Simon Cozens | Simon Cozens has been programming PCs as a freelance contractor since the age of 10. He was introduced to Perl and Linux little over three years ago and has been using both exclusively ever since. He is regularly contracted by Oracle Corporation to develop Perl scripts, including low-administration web server systems and tools to automate adminstration of Oracle databases, web servers and UNIX systems. He has a special interest in documentation and literate programming, and has written a literate programming environment for Perl. His other Perl programs include a set of networking tools, a program to trap unsolicited email, and a series of varied Perl modules. He is currently working on a system to read English descriptions of markup languages and generate translators between them, and also a Perl version of the Te X typesetting utility. Simon lives in Oxford, where he investigates computer processing of Japanese. His interests include music, typesetting and the modern Greek language and culture. |
