How This Book Is Organized

Chapter 1: General Purpose Utilities

Perl is an ideal language for the small but helpful programs for everyday use. Chapter 1 includes scripts for tasks such as currency conversion, generating daily reminders, and finding duplicate files.

Chapter 2: Website Management

Perl and the Web go together. This chapter contains scripts that make web administration easier. You can use the scripts in this chapter to check your website for integrity, check for hackers, and even throw hackers off your system.

Chapter 3: CGI Debugging

This chapter includes a variety of techniques and tools for debugging CGI programs.

Chapter 4: CGI Programs

Now that you know how to debug CGI programs, you can try a few. The programs in Chapter 4 provide a Internet guest book, a visitor counter, and a random joke generator.

Chapter 5: Internet Data Mining

There is a lot of data on the Internet. This chapter shows you ways of extracting it. For example, you can get a daily stock quote or download your favorite comics.

Chapter 6: Unix System Administration

Perl is an ideal language for automating system administration tasks. This includes things like adding and deleting users as well as detecting system hogs and throwing them off the system.

Chapter 7: Picture Utilities

The digital camera revolutionized photography, but did you ever try to paste disk files into a photo album? Perl lets you create and edit an electronic photo album with ease.

Chapter 8: Games and Learning Tools

This chapter shows some simple teaching tools for kids who are two years old and older.

Chapter 9: Development Tools

Perl has the ability to analyze and report on large amounts of text. This can help you as a developer when it comes to things like figuring out the structure of large programs or eliminating dead code.

Chapter 10: Mapping

What does Perl have to do with hiking the Grand Canyon (a place so primitive that at the bottom you can't even get an Internet connection)? The answer is that Perl can be used to download, view, and print government topological maps and aerial photographs.

Chapter 11: Regular Expression Grapher

Perl's regular expression language is powerful, compact, and cryptic. Unless you present things graphically, in which case even the worst regular expressions become simple to do.