Perl

Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) is a text-processing language developed by Larry Wall which looks like a combination of C and several Unix text processing utilities (e.g. awk, sed and tr). Its detractors claim that Perl is actually an acronym for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.

It is often used as an implementation language for CGI scripts, but it can be used for any application involving text manipulation (for example, all the index files on this CD were generated by Perl scripts).

Development tools:

	Indigo Perl 5.6 A prebuilt binary distribution for Windows which includes preinstalled version of many useful Perl packages (e.g libwww, a package of tools for Internet programming, and Perl/Tk, a package to build graphical programs in Perl using Tk.    ¤  Jun 2001. Free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Home site: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/ports/
	The Cygnus toolkit A Windows port of most of the GNU Unix tools, including the GCC compiler collection 2.95.3 (covering C, C++, Objective-C, x86 assembler Fortran 77) as well as Perl 5.6.1, Python 2.1 and Tcl/Tk 8.0. Other tools such as make, gdb (the GNU debugger), vi, tar, gzip, grep, sed, awk, and many more are also provided. Even Unix shells such as bash are included, so you can have what appears to be a Unix environment on a Windows system if you want.    ¤  Aug 2001. Free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Home site: http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/
	Nmake 1.50 A version of the "make" utility that originally shipped with MS Visual C++ 2.0 but now released as freeware. It is highly compatible with the original Unix version of make, and it is particularly useful for installing Perl modules since other versions of "make" often won't work with the makefiles that Perl generates.    ¤  Jun 1995. Freeware. Home site: http://www.microsoft.com/

Tutorials and FAQs:

	A Perl Tutorial A nice introduction to Perl by Nik Silver.    ¤  15 Jun 1995. Reproduced by permission. Home site: http://agora.leeds.ac.uk/Perl/start.html (now gone)
	A Perl CGI Tutorial A nice introduction to using Perl for CGI scripting by Nik Silver.    ¤  15 Jun 1995. Reproduced by permission. Home site: http://agora.leeds.ac.uk/Perl/Cgi/start.html (now gone)
	Tom's Object-Oriented Perl 5 Tutorial A tutorial about the object-oriented programming features of Perl by Tom Christiansen.    ¤  29 Apr 1999. Freely redistributable. Home site: http://www.perl.com/doc/manual/html/pod/perltoot.html
	The Perl FAQ Questions and answers about Perl in general.    ¤  8 Jan 1999. Reproduced by permission. Home site: http://www.perl.com/perl/faq/
	The Perl CGI FAQ Questions and answers about Perl for CGI scripting.    ¤  1996. Freely redistributable. Home site: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/doc/FAQs/cgi/perl-cgi-faq.html
	The Perl for Win32 FAQ Questions and answers about the specifics of using Perl on Windows systems.    ¤  20 Jan 1997. Freely redistributable. Home site: http://www.endcontsw.com/people/evangelo/Perl_for_Win32_FAQ.html (now gone)

Reference material:

	The Perl 5 Manual The full set of documentation for Perl. You may have to search a bit, but whatever you want to know should be in here somewhere!    ¤  17 Mar 1997. Freely redistributable. Home site: http://www.perl.com/perl/manual/html/index.html
	Perl 5 Reference Guide A concise Perl reference which is easier to use than the full documentation, but less detailed as a result.    ¤  7 Jun 2000. Freely redistributable. Home site: http://www.rexswain.com/perl5.html

External resources:

	The Perl home page The primary entry point to the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), the main source for Perl software.
	The Perl Mongers
	The Perl Journal
	Perl links at Yahoo These are also available at Yahoo UK.
	The comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup A newsgroup for discussion of general Perl-related issues.
	Active State A company which is now the main source of binary distributions of Perl, Python and Tcl/Tk for Windows. Unfortunately, their licenses do not permit their products to be redistributed by third parties. However, the source code for all these products is free, so other binary versions are available elsewhere if the Active State license restrictions prove to be a problem, or you can compile the source code yourself.