Written by core members of the technology's development team, Perl Template Toolkit guides you through the entire process of installing, configuring, using, and extending the Template Toolkit. It begins with a fast-paced but thorough tutorial on building web content with the Template Toolkit, and then walks you through generating and using data files, particularly with XML. It also provides detailed information on the Template Toolkit's modules, libraries, and tools in addition to a complete reference manual.
Perl Template Toolkit is an introduction to the Template Toolkit. The Template Toolkit is most often used in the creation of web sites, but it can be used as a general text manipulation tool. It is a presentation management system that allows you to separate aspects of presentation from the rest of an application, in the same way that a database allows you to separate storage concerns.
The information in this book is based on Version 2.10 of the Template Toolkit, released in July 2003. The Template Toolkit will continue to evolve. Apart from bug fixes and minor updates, the Version 2.* branch will remain pretty much the same as it is now.
Version 3, expected sometime in 2004, will include new features and some changes to the internal architecture. However, it is an important requirement that new versions of the Template Toolkit are backward-compatible with previous versions wherever possible. Although the Template Toolkit may change in some subtle ways, the basic principles, syntax, and style are here to stay.
