Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Other Options

Python is fairly similar to Perl — less well known but also less idiosyncratic. It is also a scripting language, but one that has been properly written along sound academic lines (not necessarily a bad thing) and is easy to learn.

JavaScript was originally created for use in browsers, but it has found use on servers as well. It has only a very superficial relationship to Java, but is commonly used as a scripting language in a variety of different application environments. Another possibility, which we would suggest you pass by unless you have absolutely no choice, is Visual Basic — more likely the VBScript form used in various Microsoft products. BASIC was invented as a painless way of introducing students to programming. It was never intended to be a proper programming language, and subsequent attempts to make it one have proved largely unsuccessful, though developers certainly use it. A surprising number of big, expensive e-commerce sites often collapse in a spray of Visual Basic error messages. People who like Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) but don’t like Microsoft’s server can find a Perl emulator in the CPAN archive (http://www.cpan.org/), and Sun Microsystems offers a commercial ASP implementation that works with Apache (http://wwws.sun.com/software/chilisoft/ ).