Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

What’s Perl Good For?

Perl has the advantage of being easy to learn if you just want to write simple scripts—thus its appeal to the ever-impatient system administrator and the deadline-driven CGI developer. However, as you become more ambitious, Perl lets you act on those ambitions. Chapter 2 covers how to get and install Perl, and Chapter 3 through Chapter 6 cover the basics of the Perl language, its functions, and how to use the Perl debugger.

On top of the Perl language itself, however, are the Perl modules. You can think of modules as add-ons to the Perl language that allow you to streamline tasks by providing a consistent API. Perl itself is fun to use, but the modules lend Perl even more flexibility and enormous power. Furthermore, anyone can write and distribute a Perl module. Some modules are deemed important enough or popular enough to be distributed with Perl itself, but very few are actually written by the core Perl developers themselves. Chapter 7 introduces you to Perl modules, and Chapter 8 covers the standard modules that are distributed with Perl itself.

The most popular Perl module is CGI.pm, which gives a simple interface to developing common gateway interface (CGI) applications in Perl. While Perl itself is indispensable for many different tasks, its text-manipulation features make it perfect for CGI development on the Web. In fact, the resurgence of Perl over the past few years must be credited to its popularity as a CGI language. Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 talk ...