Lorrie Cranor Programming Perl

The first thing you notice about the Perl book is the camel. The hardy beast is standing nonchalantly and grinning ever so slyly. This is not just any old desert dwelling dromedary. This is a camel with an attitude. And that's the way Perl creator and Programming Perl co-author Larry Wall wanted it to be. Wall likens the camel-with-an-attitude to his free Practical Extraction and Report Language -- Perl. ``It's ugly but useful,'' he says. Since 1986 when Wall first developed Perl -- an interpreted data reduction language -- to solve a problem that awk could not handle, the language has grown to include a variety of built-in functions, associative arrays, regular expression handling, object-oriented features, and some of the most useful bits of several other programming languages. It is now a popular tool for system administrators and programmers who want to develop code to manipulate strings, files, and processes. Recently it has become the language of choice for programming interactive applications on the World Wide Web