Chapter 9. Perl

The Perl programming language has grown from a scruffy tool exploited by Unix systems administrators for informal scripting to the most widely used development platform for the World Wide Web. Perl was not designed for the Web or for databases, but its ease of use and powerful text-handling abilities have made it a natural for application development in these areas. A few of the libraries developed for Perl—called modules—have made it even more attractive for web and database applications.

Perl accesses databases through the DataBase Driver/DataBase Interface (DBD/DBI). The name arises from its two-layer implementation. At the bottom is the database driver layer. There, modules exist for each type of database accessible from Perl: MySQL, Oracle, and so on. On top of these database-dependent driver modules lies a database-independent interface layer, which is the interface you use.