Perl is a high level programming language that can be used for server side scripting for your web pages but also can be used to create programs that run networks and other external programs.

I read somewhere that Perl was designed to make the easy jobs easy and the difficult jobs not impossible. This is true, the basic Perl which you will need to make interactive data-driven web sites is quite straight forward and easy to pickup as you go.

Again Perl has to be installed on your web server (or local machines web server) to run but once things are setup and running you will have no problem picking up the basics. For the internet you will find Perl best at manipulating large amounts of text for extracting different parts of web pages, sending data from one page to another, processing forms and sending them as e-mail, making data-driven graphs and loads more.

I would put an example here but there are lots of better sites, books and other instructional material available that it would look a bit stupid in comparison, so follow the links for more info and tutorials. Good luck with Perl, and to novices - keep it really simple at first until you understand the processes properly and then take the next step.

by Pete

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