Learning Perl | Search for a title, author or keyword | ||||||||
Learning Perl By Randal Schwartz, Tom Christiansen & Larry Wall. Second Edition, July 1997. Perl is short for "Practical Extraction and Report Language", although it has also been called a "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister". There's no point in arguing which one is more correct, because both are endorsed by Larry Wall, Perl's creator and chief architect, implementor, and maintainer. Perl is designed to assist the programmer with common tasks that are probably too heavy or too portability-sensitive for the shell, and yet too weird or short-lived or complicated to code in C or some other UNIX glue language. Once you become familiar with Perl, you may find yourself spending less time trying to get shell quoting ( or C declarations ) right, and more time reading Usenet news and downhill snowboarding, because Perl is a great tool for leverage. Perl is distributed under the GNU Public License, which says something like, "you can distribute binaries of Perl only if you make the source code available at no cost, and if you modify Perl, you have to distribute the source to your modifications as well." And that's essentially free. In fact, it's not only free, but it runs rather nicely on nearly everything that calls itself UNIX or UNIX-like and has a C compiler. Besides UNIX or UNIX-like systems, people have also been addicted enough to Perl to port it to the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Macintosh family, VMS, OS/2, even MS/DOS and Windows ( and probably even more by the time you read this ).
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