Perl

Perl remains one of the top languages for web programming. There was a period of time when people were negative about CGI programming because of the expense of the CPU, but technologies like mod_perl in Apache closed that argument.

I can't pinpoint the reason Perl is so popular. On one hand I want to say it's because of the roots of the language -- a powerful text manipulation language with a rich set of built-in functionality and a shorthand-like (and quirky?) syntax. On the other hand I want to say it's because of the object-oriented style of the later versions of Perl and all the modules that have appeared which allow you to script almost anything.

Either way, Perl is here to stay and I for one am glad.

Tips

Although I do use Perl for server side web programming I also use it (maybe even more) as a great general purpose tool for text processing.

What do I mean by that?

Perl is a great tool for cleaning up text files (i.e., parse out what you want; trash the rest), converting text files (i.e., a tab delimited file to a comma separated file) or running reports on lots of files (i.e., getting images tags for a directory full of HTML files). Any repeated manual task you have to do with a text editor can be made easier with Perl.

ListHTMLTitles.pl is a short little script I wrote to pull out all the <TITLE> tags from a directory full of HTML files and create a report to view the (in)consistency of your site's titles. The script was written for use as a droplet from MacPerl which basically means that @ARGV is a list of directories to process. Feel free to download and give it a try.

Links

CPAN -- The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. The source for modules and the latest distribution.

cgi-lib.pl -- This is still my choice for CGI programming with Perl. I've used it for many, many, years and can't bare to tear myself away.

Perl.com -- O'Reilly's contribution (besides those book things ;) to the world of Perl.