“Professional Perl Programming brings you the expertise of
professional programmers, taking a problem solving approach to help
you gain the knowledge you need.”
“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.”
“There are Unix shells that are now almost as capable as Perl,
but they don’t have the same range of library support and nothing
like CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) to encourage them.
Technically, there is no reason why they might not have grown to
challenge Perl as the scripting language of choice, but since they
were traditionally thought of as “for scripts only”, they never
did. In this respect the defining moment for Perl was the
introduction of proper support for modules and packages (and as a
side-effect, objects) in Perl 5, which took it from being a better
kind of shell script to a language that supported and encouraged
the use of libraries. So, Perl is well suited for real-world
applications – and if you don’t believe me, just list the modules
available on CPAN (www.cpan.org).” says Peter Wainwright the main
author of this title.”