Learning Perl on Win32 Systems

Perl and the Web: Beyond CGI Programming

Perl is used for much more than CGI programming. Other uses include logfile analysis, cookie and password management, clickable images, and image manipulation. And this list is still just the tip of the iceberg.

Custom Publishing Systems

Commercial web publishing systems may make things easy, especially for nonprogrammers, but they just aren’t infinitely flexible the way a real programming language is. Without source code, you’re locked into someone else’s design decisions: if something doesn’t work quite the way you want it to, you can’t fix it. No matter how many whiz-bang programs become available for the consumer to purchase, a programmer will always be needed for those special jobs that don’t quite fit the mold. And, of course, someone has to write the publishing software in the first place.

Perl is great for creating custom publishing systems tailored to your unique needs. You can easily convert raw data into zillions of HTML pages en masse. Sites all over the web use Perl to generate and maintain their entire web site. The Perl Journal (http://www.tpj.com) uses Perl to generate its pages. The Perl Language Home Page (http://www.perl.com) has nearly ten thousand web pages automatically maintained and updated by various Perl programs.

PerlIS and PerlScript

Each time a user invokes a CGI program or script, the web server needs to create a new instance of that program. While this is a reliable, proven way of doing things, there are more efficient ...