How This Book Is Organized
This book has 10 parts, as follows:
- Part I
Chapter 1 gets you oriented to Perl and the Perl community.
Chapter 2 gives you some pointers on installing Perl and its modules on your machine. This chapter introduces you to the CPAN archive and discusses using the CPAN module to retrieve the latest versions of Perl modules.
- Part II
Chapter 3 is about using the perl program itself. It covers environment variables, command-line options, and the differences in executing the Unix and Win32 versions of Perl.
Chapter 4 is the turbo-charged tutorial/reference to the Perl language. If you’ve never programmed before, then you might need a tutorial that goes more slowly. But if you have some experience with other programming languages, this chapter should teach you enough to start writing Perl programs.
Chapter 5 is a reference chapter for each of the built-in functions of Perl.
Chapter 6 is about using the Perl debugger to help locate the rare errors in your programs.
- Part III
Chapter 7 gives a quick introduction to Perl packages, Perl modules, and object-oriented programming in Perl.
Chapter 8 is a reference to each of the modules included in the standard Perl distribution.
- Part IV
Chapter 9 is a brief introduction to the concepts behind CGI programming.
Chapter 10 covers the very popular CGI.pm module, which is deemed essential by many CGI programmers.
Chapter 11 is about mod_perl, the Apache module that can be used to significantly improve CGI performance and allows you to embed ...