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11.10.09 Perl - The Most Popular Language No One Is Talking About  By
Rodney Sellers
Even though PHP and ASP are the two new languages that have all the buzz currently, Perl is still a major player. It allows for faster loading websites and little overhead. It shouldn't be surprising, but Perl runs some of the biggest websites on the Internet such as Amazon, IMDB, Slashdot, and many more. It is just as good, if not better for web 2.0 development as PHP or ASP. But don't think that Perl is just for website development. Unix administrators have been using it for a long time to automate tasks. I do not know of a better language for log management or string manipulation. To get started in Perl, there is excellent documentation at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Perl. They also have a Perl programming category that has many other open books for Perl. They start at the very basic to the advanced topics. There are other great resources such as the O'Reilly site, perl.com. It discusses books, blogs, and the latest developments in Perl. For those who wish to use Perl on Windows, ActivePerl is the easiest way to start. If you are an advanced user and looking for custom builds of Perl, you may wish to get involved on some of the development projects such as the Vanilla Perl Project. For those of you windows users who like to have an editor, I would highly recommend Notepad++. It is an Open Source project that is very robust, and with the proper plug-in, you can execute your Perl scripts straight from within Notepad++. It may be surprising for some windows administrators that you can run perl from the command line, as you do in UNIX/Linux. There are a few differences that you much watch out for. This simple bit of code in Unix will run without problem. perl -e 'print "Hello world\n"' However in Windows, it will not. You have to know the differences between the command-interpreters between Unix and Windows. On a Windows system, the code should read. perl -e "print \"Hello world\n\"" As you can see, very little has changed but it makes a huge difference to the command-interpreters.
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