Beginning Perl

Immensely popular Perl combines the best features of C, key UNIX utilities, and powerful regular expressions. Perl is commonly used for web programming, as well as e-mail and Usenet news filtering. Fast becoming the system administrator's scripting language of choice, Perl is also useful for file and directory manipulation, database access, and a broad range of daily system operator chores. This second edition dispels the image of Perl as a sometimes confusing, obscure language, and instead, promotes Perl as a legible, sensible programming language. Concise and focused, this book reaches out to users of all experience levels, and covers basic to advanced aspects of Perl, Apache modPerl, and Perlscript (for use with Wintel systems). This book also stresses the cross-platform nature of Perl. TOC:Introduction.- First Steps in Perl.- Scalers.- Control Flow Constructs.- Lists and Arrays.- Hashes.- Subroutines.- Regular Expressions.- Working with Filehandles.- String Processing.- Operating System Stuff.- References and Complex Data.- Object-Oriented Perl.- Introduction to CGI.- Perl and Databases.- Miscellaneous Modules.- Appendices: Special Variables; Solutions to Exercises.