Perl Cookbook

Acknowledgments

This book wouldn’t exist but for a legion of people standing, knowing and unknowing, behind the authors. At the head of this legion would have to be our editor, Linda Mui, carrot on a stick in one hand and a hot poker in the other. She was great.

As the author of Perl, Larry Wall was our ultimate reality check. He made sure we weren’t documenting things he was planning to change and helped out on wording and style.^[2] If now and then you think you’re hearing Larry’s voice in this book, you probably are.

Larry’s wife, Gloria, a literary critic by trade, shocked us by reading through every single word—and actually liking most of them. Together with Sharon Hopkins, resident Perl Poetess, she helped us rein in our admittedly nearly insatiable tendency to produce pretty prose sentences that could only be charitably described as lying somewhere between the inscrutably complex and the hopelessly arcane, eventually rendering the meandering muddle into something legible even to those whose native tongues were neither PDP-11 assembler nor Mediæval Spanish.

Our three most assiduous reviewers, Mark-Jason Dominus, Jon Orwant, and Abigail, have worked with us on this book nearly as long as we’ve been writing it. Their rigorous standards, fearsome intellects, and practical experience in Perl applications have been of invaluable assistance. Doug Edwards methodically stress-tested every piece of code from the first seven chapters of the book, finding subtle border cases no one else ...