Learning Perl on Win32 Systems | Search for a title, author or keyword | ||||||||
Learning Perl on Win32 Systems By Randal L. Schwartz, Erik Olson & Tom Christiansen. First Edition, August 1997. Perl is a language designed for people who need to get things done. Written by the amazing Larry Wall as a kind of glue language to tie together all of the loose ends of everyday computing life, Perl is a tool for leveraging the skills and tools that you already have. Perl has become an indispensable boon to Windows NT webmasters, power users, administrators, and programmers who have discovered how much easier it is to get their work done when Perl is doing some of it for them. Perl is an easy language, but it's also a rich language. You'll be surprised at how much you can do with just a little bit of Perl code. Often, rewriting a small scrap of Perl wizardry requires hundreds of lines of C. For many addicts, Perl is more than a language, it's an entire culture. For many folks, Perl was an indispensable part of their UNIX toolkits that they took with them to new environments. As a result, Perl grew, and became even more general and more powerful. What was once just an exceptional text-processing language that bound UNIX programs together has become a widespread language that seems to bind much of the Internet together. Perl is now used to create web pages, read Usenet news, do system adminstration and systems programming, write network clients and servers, and much more. Here's another tenet of the Perl way: "There's more than one way to do it" ( TIMTOWTDI, pronounced 'Tim-Toady') . What this means is that Perl programmers are a results-oriented lot. They're likely to applaud any tool that gets the job done, regardless of whether or not the code looks like something they would have written. Another side effect of this tenet that particularly endears itself to Win32 Perl programmers is that Perl is highly portable. Although ready-made scripts that you find on the Net may use existing UNIX tools or UNIX system calls that aren't portable to the Windows environment ( this scenario has led Win32 programmers to say, "There's more than one way to do it, and it's a good thing, because most of the ways don't work" ), you can nearly always find a way to make them work ( and nobody will make fun of you if your solution is perhaps somewhat less than elegant ). Perl for Win32 sprang into existence when Microsoft commissioned ActiveState Tool Corporation ( formerly Hip Communications ) to do a port for inclusion in the Windows NT Resource Kit. ActiveState is still improving Perl for Win32, extending it with functionality specific to the Win32 platforms, and incorporating the best and most appropriate new features as they are added to the core Perl distribution.
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