PERL Programming

This book provides tools and strategies to improve the performance of existing Web applications in Perl with case studies and real-world examples. It also provides principles and ideas that help Web programmers create an extensible framework for future growth. Special attention is given to upcoming technologies, including integration, the wireless Web, and XML-based automation, with an eye toward using existing tools to address the challenges of tomorrow's applications.

Modern Perl is one way to describe how experienced and effective Perl 5 programmers work. They use language idioms. They take advantage of the CPAN. They're recognizably Perlish, and they show good taste and craftsmanship and a full understanding of Perl.

Perl is an immensely popular scripting language that combines the best features of C, key UNIX utilities and a powerful use of regular expressions. It has a wide range of uses beyond simple text processing and is commonly used for web programming - creating and parsing CGI forms, validating HTML syntax and hyperlinks - as well as e-mail and Usenet news filtering. Perl is increasingly the system administrator's scripting language of choice and is used for file and directory manipulation, database access and a whole range of daily system operator chores.

Perl soared to popularity as a language for creating and managing web content, but with LWP (Library for WWW in Perl), Perl is equally adept at consuming information on the Web. LWP is a suite of modules for fetching and processing web pages.

This is a book written with the goal to teach Perl programmers with a strong C and Unix background how to use techniques with roots in functional programming languages like Lisp that are available in Perl as well, but less known.

Although using Mason isn't difficult, creating a Mason-based site can be tricky. Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason shows you how to create large, complex, dynamically driven web sites that look good and are a snap to maintain. This concise book covers Mason's features from several angles, and includes a study of the authors' sample site where these features are used. You'll learn how to visualize multiple Mason-based solutions to any given problem and select among them.