Perl

Web Development with Apache and Perl - Part 3
Manning Publications Co.
July 12, 2002
Open source tools provide a powerful and flexible environment for web development and maintenance. If your site has complex business rules or server logic, then you need more than just an interface builder. You need a strong application language with effective tools ready at hand. Perl's strengths make it a natural choice. This weeks installment covers User Management and Login Sessions. From Manning Publications Co.

Web Development with Apache and Perl - Part 2
Manning Publications Co.
July 3, 2002
Open source tools provide a powerful and flexible environment for web development and maintenance. If your site has complex business rules or server logic, then you need more than just an interface builder. You need a strong application language with effective tools ready at hand. Perl's strengths make it a natural choice. This weeks installment covers User Authentication. From Manning Publications Co.

Web Development with Apache and Perl
Manning Publications Co.
June 28, 2002
Open source tools provide a powerful and flexible environment for web development and maintenance. If your site has complex business rules or server logic, then you need more than just an interface builder. You need a strong application language with effective tools ready at hand. Perl's strengths make it a natural choice. From Manning Publications Co.

Tracking FedEx and UPS Packages Online
Jonathan Eisenzopf
January 21, 2002
The script in this article will keep your customers on your site and provide self-service package tracking capabilities for Federal Express and/or UPS.

Perl for Web Site Management - Part 3
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
December 14, 2001
This third and final installment looks at storing the data, the "visit" data structure, and the &store_line subroutine. Perl for Web Site Management shows how to write CGI scripts, incorporate search engines, convert multiple text files to HTML, monitor log files, and track visitors to your site.

Perl for Web Site Management - Part 2
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
December 11, 2001
This second installment looks at the log-analysis script and different log file formats. Perl for Web Site Management shows how to write CGI scripts, incorporate search engines, convert multiple text files to HTML, monitor log files, and track visitors to your site.

Perl for Web Site Management
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
December 4, 2001
Perl for Web Site Management shows how to write CGI scripts, incorporate search engines, convert multiple text files to HTML, monitor log files, and track visitors to your site. This first installment looks at parsing web access logs and converting IP addresses.

Creating An Index Image
Jonathan Eisenzopf
December 18, 2001
In this article, we will learn how to use the GD library to create an index image that contains thumbnails of images in a given directory.

Automating Image Manipulation with GD - Part 2
Jonathan Eisenzopf
November 12, 2001
In the last article, we learned how to use the the GD library to draw borders, add text, and create thumbnails. In this article, we will learn how to create charts and graphs with the GD::Graph module.

Automating Image Manipulation with GD
Jonathan Eisenzopf
October 22, 2001
This is the first article in a series that will explore concepts and techniques that can automate many image manipulation tasks. This series will utilize the GD image manipulation library.

Processing Text with Perl Modules
Jonathan Eisenzopf
September 24, 2001
In the final article of this series on text processing, Jonathan takes a tour through a cornucopia of useful text processing modules that kick the tar out of some of those arduous text processing tasks.

Processing Text with Perl Functions
Jonathan Eisenzopf
August 29, 2001
In this second article in the series Jonathan explains how to effectively leverage Perl's built-in text handling functions to process CSV files and perform an e-mail merge.

Professional Perl Programming: Part 4
Wrox
July 27, 2001
This installment covers returning values from subroutines, returning the undefined value, handling context, assignable subroutines, attribute lists, and special attributes. This is the fourth and final installment in this excerpt.

Weaving Magic With Regular Expressions
Jonathan Eisenzopf
July 16, 2001
This is the first article in a series that will show how to leverage Perl's extraordinary text manipulation capabilities to save time and make you more effective in managing the complexities of your Web site.

Professional Perl Programming: Part 3
Wrox
July 13, 2001
In this third installment we look at prototypes, parameters, and variables, among other things. Both aspiring and experienced Perl programmers will benefit from the expertise in this book.

Professional Perl Programming: Part 2
Wrox
June 29, 2001
This second installment covers checking for and defining subroutines, passing parameters, lists and hashes, and named parameters. Both aspiring and experienced Perl programmers will benefit from the expertise in this book

Professional Perl Programming
Wrox
June 25, 2001
Both aspiring and experienced Perl programmers will benefit from the expertise in this book, whether they are looking to develop serious applications, improve their productivity, or simply learn a more powerful and portable replacement for shell scripts. This first installment covers subroutines.

Beginning Perl - 5th Installment
Wrox
April 6, 2001
Learn about Inline Comments and Modifiers, Grouping without Backreferences, Lookaheads and Lookbehinds in this excerpt of Beginning Perl from Wrox Press.

Beginning Perl - 4th Installment
Wrox
March 23, 2001
This fourth installment covers working with regexps, substitutions, changing delimiters, and transliterations. This manuscript is Chapter 5 Regular Expressions from the Wrox Press book Beginning Perl.

Beginning Perl - 3rd Installment
Wrox
March 9, 2001
This manuscript is Chapter 5 Regular Expressions from the Wrox Press book Beginning Perl. This third installment covers quantifiers and their repetition as well as providing examples. This book introduces Perl to those new to programming - although you'll find it easier if you have some basic programming experience.

Beginning Perl - 2nd Installment
Wrox
February 23, 2001
This manuscript is Chapter 5 Regular Expressions from the Wrox Press book Beginning Perl. This second installment covers character, posix, and unicode classes. This book introduces Perl to those new to programming - although you'll find it easier if you have some basic programming experience.

Beginning Perl - 1st Installment
Wrox
February 9, 2001
This manuscript is Chapter 5 Regular Expressions from the Wrox Press book Beginning Perl. This book introduces Perl to those new to programming - although you'll find it easier if you have some basic programming experience. This is the first installment.

The Perl You Need to Know
Aaron Weiss

Part 25: Life Cycles — A Series Ends, A New Perl Is Born
June 18, 2001
This month Aaron Weiss looks at the development of Perl 6: where it is, how it's gotten there, and where it might be going. This is the final installment in the Perl You Need to Know series.

Part 24: Introduction to Object Oriented Perl
May 21, 2001
This month, we'll take stock of the object orientation syntax, and begin a broader understanding of what working with objects in Perl is really all about.

Part 23: CPAN, a Farmer's Market for Perl
April 16, 2001
This installment looks at using the CPAN module to ease module management, including finding and installing modules, especially for users who do not have administrative access to the Perl installation tree itself.

Part 22: Warts and All
March 19, 2001
As a Perl developer, you benefit from knowing not only the strengths and capabilities of a programming language, but also its limitations. This month we get negative, putting a big mirror up to the camel that is Perl, and taking stock of its lumps.

Part 21: Benchmarking Perl
January 22, 2001
This months installment of The Perl You Need To Know covers the Benchmark module — the handy Perl stopwatch with which we can time, optimize, and slim down on code.

Part 20: Disk-based Data Structures (DBM)
December 18, 2000
In Part 20 of The Perl You Need to Know series, Aaron Weiss looks at several Perl DBM, or database management, solutions which have much less overheard than DBI and are a quick way to store and use Perl data structures to and from disk.

Part 19: Personalization Methods Part 3: Embperl
November 20, 2000
Every good, or not so good, work of science fiction is a trilogy -- it's an immutable law of nature. Our series on Web personalization, back-ends, and Perl is no fiction, and only arguable scientific, but a trilogy indeed. This months installment of The Perl You Need to Know series concludes the Personalization Methods Trilogy with a look at how Embperl eases the burden of tying together the disparate parts of the personalization system.

Part 18: Personalization Methods Part 2: Databases and Cookies
October 23, 2000
Personalization on the Web has moved beyond snail mail spam invitations that read "You, Mrs. Robinson, may be a million dollar winner!". Nowadays, sophisticated Web sites let users create accounts, to which information and preferences can be tied. For example, e-commerce sites often let you save shipping information to ease repeat purchases, and some search engines offer the visitor a chance to tailor appearance and sorting of results. This month we'll begin a personalization architecture that uses both a backend database and cookies to manage user accounts in a flexible manner.

Part 17: Personalization Methods Part 1 with a look at Cookies
September 18, 2000
Search engines have long offered a simple staple of Web-based personalization, a drop down menu where you can choose whether to view 10 or 20 or X results per page. Herein lies the bedrock principle behind personalizing techniques: "I, the server, am going to dig up a bunch of data to deliver to you; please tell me how you would like it delivered." In this article Aaron Weiss gives us a beginning look at implementing personalization features on the Web.

Part 16: A Simple Approach to PDF
August 28, 2000
Adobe's Portable Document Format, or PDF, has become something of a standard for storing and forwarding documents destined for the printed page. Most Web-based Perl scripts are built to deliver results in HTML format, aimed at the Web browser; in some cases, though, the option to deliver result data in PDF format may be a real boon to visitors of your site. This month we'll look at one rather simple way of bringing PDF capability to your Perl scripts.

Part 15: Embedded Perl
July 17, 2000
Back in the halcyon days of the Perl You Need to Know Part 4, we looked at inserting the output from Perl-based CGI scripts into pre-fabricated template pages. Ah, good times, good times. Now, some 11 Perls You Need to Know later, we're more sophisticated and urbane, thirsting for shaken martinis and intrigued by the promises of embedded scripting languages, made popular by Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) and the open-source PHP. Why embedded? Embedded scripting lets you intermingle powerful programming within HTML documents, streamlining the process of creating dynamic, template-based pages. Perl fiends need not be left out in the cold -- there are several options for embedding Perl into HTML, and we'll look at several today, ultimately focusing on the Apache::ASP module.

Part 14: Special: Introduction to mod_perl Part 3
June 19, 2000
We conclude the mod_perl trilogy with some tricks and sleight-of-hand with which you can squeeze a few extra processor cycles out of your Web server -- also known as optimizations. Specifically, we'll look at some ways to take advantage of the mod_perl environment to better optimize usage and, more importantly, re-usage of Perl scripts and database requests.

Part 13: Special: Introduction to mod_perl Part 2
May 15, 2000
Last month we took a magical journey to the land of mod_perl. In that article, we focused on the exciting relationship between the Apache Web server and the mod_perl module, and how this relationship optimizes execution of Perl by reducing forking and caching pre-compiled code within Apache child processes. This month, we shift our attention more towards actual code, and some ways in which your Perl code may need to be adapted to function properly within the environment created by mod_perl.

Part 12: Special: Introduction to mod_perl
April 10, 2000
Mod_perl, the module that makes for a happy but complex marriage between Perl and the Apache Web server, can ultimately offer significant performance improvements in Perl-backed Web sites.

Part 11: A Reference of References
March 13, 2000
Last month we began building complex data structures in Perl using lists, hashes, and combinations thereof. In doing so, we've flirted with the subject of references. This month our flirtation blooms into intimacy, as we cuddle up to Perl's references to help us build and manipulate complex data structures.

Part 10: Untangling Lists and Hashes
February 7, 2000
If you want to blow your mind -- in the totally legal sense -- spend some time working with Perl's list and hash data structures. In The Perl You Need to Know Part 10: Untangling Lists and Hashes, Aaron Weiss explains how to work with Perl's list and hash data structures.

Part 9: The Millennium Episode -- Time and Date Manipulation
December 13, 1999
In The Perl You Need to Know, Part 9, Aaron Weiss explains the representation and manipulation of calendar dates in Perl. Learn how Perl treats dates, days, months, hours and minutes.

Part 8: Dabbling in Live Databases - GUFE (goofy): The Generic but Usable Front End
November 8, 1999
The Perl You Need to Know, Part 8 continues it's focus on MySQL. This month Aaron Weiss gets GUFE ( - goofy - the Generic but Usable Front End) as he shows you how to build a visual front end to a live SQL database.

Part 7: Dabbling in Live Databases: MySQL
October 11, 1999
The Perl You Need to Know, Part 7 focuses on setting up MySQL and understanding its various management complexities. Learn how to create a MySQL database and populate a table with data.

Part 6: "Dabbling in Live Databases: Microsoft Access"
September 13, 1999
The Perl You Need to Know, Part 6 introduces the use of Perl for live database interaction. Learn how to construct an SQL statement, pass it to your database, and receive the results-- all using Perl.

Part 5: "Processing and Parsing Web Pages"
August 9, 1999
In The Perl You Need to Know we've explored a variety of means to add content to Web pages, but we've yet to see how to retrieve information from a Web page using Perl. Last month's exploits featured the use of templates to easily insert dynamic information into pre-structured pages such as the Smallville Gazette. This month we extend this concept, retrieving information from the Web which will then be dynamically included in a template-based output page. Our partner in this scheme is Perl library LWP which, like a Swiss army knife, provides a number of tools for carving, slicing, dicing and parsing Web pages.

Part 4: On-the-Fly HTML and Web Templates
July 12, 1999
Despite the old cooking adage, not everything is better when made from scratch. In last month's "The Perl You Need to Know Part 3: Maintaining State," we touched on creating on-the-fly HTML using Perl and the CGI module, though not the main focus of that article. Typically, we use Perl to generate HTML when Web pages need to be constructed live because they incorporate information relevant to or provided by a particular visitor. This month our focus swings squarely towards HTML output and the use of Web templates in generating Web pages on-the-fly with Perl scripts and the CGI module. This article assumes at least a familiarity with Perl and the CGI module and, ideally, time spent with the previous three parts of "The Perl You Need to Know" series.

Part 3: Maintaining State
June 15, 1999
Despite the jargony jingle, maintaining state is a process in which we engage daily in our own lives, from building a ham and turkey triple-decker sandwich to reading a book. This article will focus on techniques for maintaining state across Web pages, thus allowing the Web site to "remember" information across a series of steps.

Part 2: Using Perl to Interact With Web Pages
May 10, 1999
In this article, we'll complete our look at Perl fundamentals and then jump right into using Perl to interact directly with Web pages using the CGI module. In doing so, we'll roll a simple registration log, enact some form validation, analyze environment variables, and ride some redirects. This article assumes a knowledge of Perl language fundamentals, such as variables, conditionals, loops, and functions.

The Perl You Need to Know
April 26, 1999
This article begins a series on using Perl in Web development scenarios. To start, we ease in with a general introduction to Perl itself. Future articles will take more in-depth looks at Internet capabilities you can leverage from within Perl programs. This article assumes Perl 5 as the reference version of Perl. Developers who have some familiarity with any other programming language, from BASIC to Pascal to C to JavaScript, will benefit the most from this article; however, readers with no programming background can still follow along and pick up most of the concepts.

Introduction to Perl on Windows
Selena Sol and Nikhil Kaul

Part 3: Generate the template
April 3, 2000
Part Three of Introduction to Perl on Windows takes the simple component and uses the Active State package to actually register your COM component with the Win32 registry so that you can start to use it from any COM-aware program.

Part 2: Writing COM Components in Perl
March 20, 2000
Part Two of the Introduction to Win32 Perl/COM focuses on introducing you to the concepts of COM and shows the creation of some simple COM components using Perl.

Introduction to Perl on Windows
February 14, 2000
Although Perl may have been born and raised in the Unix universe, the world's favorite practical extraction and reporting language has had, and has had for some time, an established home on Windows. Learn where to download and how to install and configure Windows based Perl.

Using a flat-file database in Perl
Jason Shindler
August 30, 1999
Web developers often need ways of speeding up the development process, without spending thousands of dollars for software. Here's how to build an easy to use database in Perl and access it via a Web page.

A Taste of Perl
Alan Richmond
Perl is by far the most popular language for CGI, because, among other things, it has powerful string matching. Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning text files, extracting information from those files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). It combines some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh.

Introduction to Perl 4
Selena Sol
January 1998
Part 2 of a four part tutorial on Introduction to Web Programming.

Introduction to Perl 5
Selena Sol
September 28, 1998
Suitable for those who already have some familiarity with Perl 4, this tutorial highlights the new features of Perl 5: a new data type: the reference; a new localization tool: the my keyword; tools to allow object oriented programming in Perl; an object oriented based library system focussed around "Modules"; new shortcuts like "qw" and "=>"

suPerlative Web Construction !
Alan & Lucy Richmond
August 10, 1998
The WDVL is maintained by one full-time and one part-time personnel. There are 1,600 pages, and adding new content, updating the glossary and navigation pages such as the Top 100 and the site map, processing user submissions to The Virtual Library of WWW Development, etc etc, while keeping them in a consistent but flexible style, with a minimum of bad links -could be an overwhelming nightmare. Are we superhuman? What's our secret?

Perl Resources
This page lists several of the best Perl resources.