August 2005
Intermediate to advanced
840 pages
17h 29m
English
book
Web Standards Programmer's Reference: HTML, CSS, JavaScript®, Perl, Python®, and PHP
by Steven M. Schafer
Content preview from Web Standards Programmer's Reference: HTML, CSS, JavaScript®, Perl, Python®, and PHP
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
25.1. The History of Perl
The Practical Extraction and Report Language (Perl) was created in 1987 by Larry Wall. Perl was originally created as a means to access and report on file contents. Perl has grown considerably from its humble beginnings and is used extensively on the Web and as a system scripting language. One of the reasons Perl is so popular is circular in nature—its popularity spawns more (community) development, which increases its popularity, and so forth.
The Perl community has created hundreds of modules, constructs that can easily be added to your scripts to increase their capabilities without having to code the capabilities yourself. There are modules to access other application data (databases, and so on), emulate protocol stacks, communicate with hardware, and more.
However, rapid growth from humble beginnings brings with it some growing pains. Perl is quirky and somewhat dated; although powerful, a lot of Perl's power comes in the form of patches and hacks. Still, Perl is one of the most powerful and versatile scripting solutions available.
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