In this update of a bestseller, two leading Perl trainers teach you to use the most universal scripting language in the age of the World Wide Web. With a foreword by Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, this smooth, carefully paced book is the "official" guide for both formal (classroom) and informal learning. It is now current for Perl version 5.004.

Learning Perl is a hands-on tutorial designed to get you writing useful Perl scripts as quickly as possible. Exercises (with complete solutions) accompany each chapter. A lengthy new chapter in this edition introduces you to CGI programming, while touching also on the use of library modules, references, and Perl's object-oriented constructs.

Perl is a language for easily manipulating text, files, and processes. It comes standard on most UNIX platforms and is available free of charge on all other important operating systems. Perl technical support is informally available — often within minutes — from a pool of experts who monitor a USENET newsgroup (comp.lang.perl.misc) with tens of thousands of readers.

Contents include:

* A quick tutorial stroll through Perl basics
* Systematic, topic-by-topic coverage of Perl's broad capabilities
* Lots of brief code examples
* Programming exercises for each topic, with fully worked-out answers
* How to execute system commands from your Perl program
* How to manage DBM databases using Perl
* An introduction to CGI programming for the Web