No-nonsense and practical, yet with wit and charm. A joy to read."
-Dan Sanderson, Software Developer, Amazon.com

"Shows style, not just facts-valuable."
-Brian Downs, former Training Director, Lucent Technologies

"Brilliant, never tedious-highly recommended!"
-Jon Allen, Maintainer of perldoc.perl.org

"You could have chosen no better primer than this book."
-Damian Conway, from the Foreword

Perl is a complex language that can be difficult to master. Perl advocates boast that "There's More Than One Way To Do It," but do you really want to learn several ways of saying the same thing to a computer?

To make Perl more accessible, Dr. Tim Maher has over the years designed and taught an essential subset of the language that is smaller, yet practical and powerful. With this engaging book you can now benefit from Minimal Perl, even if all you know about Unix is grep.

You will learn how to write simple Perl commands-many just one-liners-that go far beyond the limitations of Unix utilities, and those of Linux, MacOS/X, etc. And you'll acquire the more advanced Perl skills used in scripts by capitalizing on your knowledge of related Shell resources. Sprinkled throughout are many Unix-specific Perl tips.

This book is especially suitable for system administrators, webmasters, and software developers.