Perl is one of the most important scripting languages in use today. Open source, freely available, portable, versatile, and robust, powerful and easy to use, Perl is the first choice for thousands of professional web developers. But Perl is far more than a scripting language for the web. Supported by a comprehensive standard library and hundreds of third-party libraries, Perl is an increasingly popular choice for application programming.
This book provides comprehensive coverage of the Perl language. It covers the fundamentals of data types and file handling through advanced features like regular expressions, object-oriented programming, threads, internationalization, and integrating Perl with the C programming language. The latest version of the language, Perl 5.6, is used throughout, with commentary for those with earlier versions.
Peter Wainwright is a software consultant and developer. He gained most of his early programming experience on Solaris, writing C applications. He then discovered Linux, shortly followed by Perl and Apache, and has been programming happily there ever since.
Aldo Calpini is well known in the Perl community for his many important Win32 modules. His active participation on several mailing lists helped the Perl language grow in the Win32 community. His programming activity begun twenty years ago, and he still enjoys hacking every kind of computer he can get his hands on. He works today as lead programmer in an Italian Internet start-up company.
Arthur Corliss has been programming since buying his first home computer a Timex Sinclair 1000 with a whopping 2K of RAM (which he still has). Having worked his way through several languages, Perl has become his most frequent language of choice at his latest venture, Gallant Technologies, Inc., a software development company. In his own time he continues the madness by working on the Curses::Widgets and Curses::Forms modules, which he authored and is available on CPAN.
Simon Cozens is an Open Source programmer and author; he writes for the Perl Journal, perl.com, and other sites, and is also the author of Wrox Press' 'Beginning Perl'. He is a member of the Perl development team, and his hobbies include reading, typography and the Greek language and culture.
Chris Nandor, pudge@pobox.com, is a programmer for OSDN, working on the Slashdot code.
Aalhad Saraf is in the Systems Software Group in IBM Labs. He has been with Linux since 1995. Perl, C and C++ are his favourite tools. Has a Bachelors degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Pune, a Post Graduate Diploma awarded by the 'Centre for Development of Advanced Computing' (a scientific society of the Ministry of IT, Govt. of India). He has worked on microcontrollers/embedded systems and hand held computing devices in Syslab Automation and on an interactive gaming server for DishnetDSL - one of India's leading ISPs. He also teaches Perl, Software Engineering and Quality systems during his spare time.
