Perl

Having used Perl on for a couple of years now, I have decided to share my opinions with you. Perl is an extremely powerful scripting language, available for all Unix - and most other - operating systems. The biggest attraction of Perl, is that the massive amount of available code samples, documentation and extension libraries available on the internet. As is common with non windoze systems, users tend to be much more enthusiastic about their software, and therefore it is common for people to contribute freely to the public domain. This large resource base makes perl an extremely up to date and powerful language to use - but it still has one notn uncommon ...

I started using Perl when I had to figure out how to achieve a relatively simple but repetitive task. This is where Perl excels, you just write a few lines of code and bingo, you've got your script which saves you doing it all manually. Perl is useful in the case where you need a simple bit of code to achieve something, but you don't want to spend allday writing it. You can create useful programs in Perl much quicker than you could with most other languages (eg. C++). Its not so good for large programs (its interpreted, so runs slower than a compiled language like C or C++). One of the things that puts beginners off Perl is when they see the ...

I've been coding Perl for about a year and a half now in Unix/Linux/BSD using it as the main tool for Web development in my job. I've built numerous projects with it and find it ideal for the sort of development done in the Web industry. It's proven itself to be scalable from a small scale CGI up to a system for generating a wide number of pages from templates. Essentially it's the glue for holding Web sites together and making them do intelligent things. When it comes to building dynamic web sites there's only one other tool I use for the job and that's PHP. Perl's strength comes in its handling of text, manipulating textual data in ...