PERL for Not Yet Techies

Computer Careers: "The Duct Tape of the Internet"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

PERL stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language. Its main use in a computer career is to scan text files (that is, strings of words, such as this) and extract useful information from the text. In other words, it’s designed to "read." PERL is also good at printing reports based on that information. It’s intended to be practical and easy to use.

The main place where you are likely to encounter PERL, is on the Internet – where else?

Many web sites are interactive thanks to PERL. You fill out a form or order a product etc, and when you hit the Submit button, the data that you put in is sent back to the web site server through CGI – Common Gateway Interface.

What does the server do with it? Well, it does what’s it’s told. There is a program running on the server that processes your data in some way. That program could be written in C or another language, but often it’s written in PERL.

And that makes sense. Chances are good a big web site server uses the UNIX operating system. If you have put text information into a web site form and it needs to be processed in some way . . . hey, that’s what PERL is good at. See first paragraph. Scanning and extracting information from text files.

PERL also works well for for tasks involving quick prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, graphical programming, networking, and world wide web programming

These strengths make PERL especially popular with people whose computer jobs are system administrators and CGI script writers.

Because of this and the speed at which it can be written, PERL is probably therefore the most popular web programming language. It’s been called "the duct tape of the Internet." Amazon uses it to run their web site.

Version 5 of PERL is both greatly expanded and simplified from earlier versions, and also supports some object oriented programming

It was invented by Larry Wall to write programs in UNIX environments, and he is the one who keeps working on making it better.

It is open source and free, much like Linux, which has been receiving much more publicity. It also has a band of nearly fanatical followers.

Because it is an eclectic blend of the best of other languages, it is easy to learn for someone who already knows at least one other language.

What kind of company do you plan to work for? It is free, open source code policy, the enthusiasm of many of its users, its deliberate, "democratic" targeting of itself for anyone who needs to get some work done without learning a huge complex language such as C++ or Java and its applicability to the Internet, make it more important the more you want to work for a new, young, "hip" Internet company.

The kind of company where you can live on peanut butter for 3 years until stock options make you a millionaire.

You’ll also stand a better chance of achieving your computer career goals if it is simply one of a number of your Web-related tools

The more you know of others such as HTML, JavaScript etc, the better.

Knowing PERL can help you in your computer career.

Next: JavaScript

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