Description: Preface Last week, I was teachingPerlat the UCSC extension in Santa Clara, California to a group of professionals coming from all around the Bay Area. I always ask at the beginning of the class, "and so why do you want to learn Perl?". The responses vary from, "Our company has an auction site on the Web and I'm the webmaster. I need to maintain the CGI programs that process our orders, " or "I work in a genetics research group at Stanford and have to deal with tons of data . . . we're looking for the gene that causes arteriosclerosis . . . oh and I heard that if I learn Perl, I won't have to depend on programmers to do this," or "I work at a local bank and we use Perl to interface with our big Oracle databases," or "I'm a UNIX/NT system administrator and our boss has decided that all future admin scripts should be written in Perl," or "I'm designing a Web page for my wife who wants to do Taro card readings for profit," or "I just got laid off and heard that it's an absolute must to have Perl on my resume." And I am always amazed at the variety of people who show up: engineers, scientists, geneticists, meteorologists, managers, salespeople, programmers, techies, hardware guys, students, stockbrokers, administrators of all kinds, librarians, authors, bankers, artists-you name it. Perl does not exclude anyone. Perl is for everyone and it runs on everything. No matter who you are, I think you'll agree, a picture is worth a thousand words, and so is a good example.Perl by Exampleis organized to teach you Perl from scratch with examples of complete succinct programs. Each line of a script example is numbered, and important lines are highlighted in bold. The output of the program is then displayed with line numbers corresponding to the script line numbers. Following the output is a separate explanation for each of the numbered lines. The examples are small and to the point for the topic at hand. Since the backbone of this book was used as a student guide to a Perl course, the topics are modularized. Each chapter builds on the previous one with a minimum of forward referencing and a logical progression from one topic to the next. There are exercises at the end of the chapters. You will find all of the examples on the CD at the back of the book. They have been thoroughly tested on a number of major platforms. Perl by Exampleis not just a beginner's guide, but a complete guide to Perl. It covers many aspects of what Perl can do, from regular expression handling, to formatting reports, to interprocess communication. It will teach you about Perl and, in the process, a lot about UNIX and Windows. Since Perl was originally written on and for UNIX systems, some UNIX knowledge will greatly accelerate your learning path, but it is not assumed that you are by any means a guru. Anyone reading, writing, or just maintaining Perl programs can greatly profit from this text. Topics such as networking, system calls, IPC, and CGI are designed to save the time it takes to figure out how the functions work, what libraries are needed, the correct syntax, etc. This third edition also covers Perl objects, references, and CGI, as well as a new chapter to show you how to use the popularCGI.pmmodule by Lincoln Stein. Perl has a rich variety of functions for handling strings, arrays, the system interface, networking, and more. In order to understand how these functions work, background information concerning the hows, whys, and what fors is provided before demonstrating functional sample programs. This eliminates constantly wading through manual pages and other books to understand what is going on, what the arguments mean, and what the function actually does. The appendices contain a complete list of functions and definitions, command line switches, special variables, popular modules, the Perl debugger; a fully functional, object-oriented CGI program; some other helpful scripts; and a helpful

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