| Don?t spend your time wading through manuals to learn Perl. Spend it doing what you do best?creating Web pages! Perl is quickly developed and results-oriented. With this book, you?ll move seamlessly from the basics of this language to building dynamic Web sites. Combining easy-to-understand instructions with visual examples, Perl Fast & EasyЮ Web Development offers a unique, hands-on approach to this popular programming language that you won?t find anywhere else. Less time, less effort, more results!
Perl was born in October, 1987. Written by Larry Wall as a Ph.D. project, it first appeared on the comp.sources News Group as Perl version 1.0. Perl now offers a standard set of supplied libraries, object-oriented programming facilities, and expanded regular expressions. Perl used to be written as PERL (and sometimes still is), reminding us that it stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. That is what it did, back when it was first written. Now it does much more.
Perl is an interpreted language. That means it isn’t as fast as languages like C, but it also means you don’t have to keep cycling through the laborious process of editing, compiling testing, then re-editing, recompiling, and so on. With Perl, you just edit and run! It‘s a fast language to develop in and a great one to prototype with! Perl can also be very concise. It is possible to achieve a lot with very little code. In current parlance, then, Perl is a results-oriented language.
Perl has become the “glue” that allows many other tools to be linked together. It has been “ported” to many platforms and has become an essential tool for OS administrators and Web Programmers. It has been used to build complete systems, and it is also used for creating throw-away code snippets to do one-off jobs. Perl is used world-wide on numerous platforms and with many different Web servers. In many cases it is the default Web language. If an ISP offers any CGI-type programming facilities, it is likely that they will include Perl. If it offers only one language, that language is probably Perl. Perl is powerful, Perl is fast (for an interpreted language!), and Perl is useful! There is virtually no job that cannot be done with Perl, and often jobs can be done with far less code than would be possible using most other languages. |
