Preface

A long time ago, when C was a new programming language, it had plenty of detractors. “Since assembly language is faster,” they said, “there’s no reason to program in C at all.” Proponents argued that C was more programmer-friendly, and that it was easier to move C programs from one platform to another. They were right, and C triumphed over assembly language.

Now we have Perl. Perl is more programmer-friendly than C, and Perl programs are even easier to move across platforms than C programs. Java and C++ might seem attractive, but even their staunchest supporters will admit that it’s often faster to write programs in Perl. From an author’s perspective, it’s almost too easy to write Perl programs; since I began this book four months ago, the collection of Perl utilities available on the Internet has grown tremendously. Staying abreast of all the developments can be a full-time job. The language itself isn’t changing, so this book won’t be obsolete anytime soon, but the worldwide library of Perl resources continues to grow.

Perl is the up-and-coming language for everyone who needs to build software quickly and painlessly, for everyone who wants to create content for the World Wide Web, and for everyone who enjoys programming just for the fun of it. It’s a general purpose programming language: Perl has strings and subroutines and structured data types, and built-in facilities for file and process manipulation. Add to this mix the most powerful regular expression package available, context-sensitive functions, a symbolic debugger, and built-in support for database management and report generation, and you’ve got a language that’s substantially more expressive than C, yet easier to use. Unlike C, Perl is an interpreted language, so you never have to compile your programs—once written, you can run them immediately, and you can run them on all systems, not merely the computer you used for development.

With the advent of Perl 5 (released in October 1994), Perl now supports object-oriented programming, making it an effective competitor of C++. Perl 5 has been ported to nearly every flavor of UNIX, as well as DOS, Windows (and Windows NT), Macintosh, and many other operating systems.

At present, this is the only book covering Perl 5. It’s also the only Perl book to cover the Web and databases and X programming and modules and e-mail generation and object-oriented programming. It has nearly half a thousand sample programs. Like Perl, this book is huge and eclectic—but useful.