Perl and PHP are two widely used languages for building dynamic Web sites. They make up two thirds of the "P" in the Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) stack. How does their performance, using mod_perl and mod_php, compare for everyday Web programming? I attempted to find out.
Using perl -e allows you to specify a script right on the command line. It's a powerful, underused feature even for people who use Perl regularly. Perl's powerful command line options make it a more flexible replacement for sed, awk, and even vi. Combine perl -e with the command line editing capability of modern shells and you can, write, test, and debug in record time.
Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices is not your standard "learn to program" Perl book. Think of it as The Elements of Style for Perl -- the book will help you to write Perl programs that are easier to read and maintain and less likely to have errors.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- So what was the bottom line from the PyCON 2005 conference, held here last week? Python is an open-source technology whose use in enterprise IT operations will only grow for the foreseeable future.
Mission-critical development organizations often regard only a handful of languages -- C#, Java, XML, SQL, and few others -- as safe enough for serious projects. From this perspective, Python has been traditionally lumped with "experimental" or "toy" languages. Over and over, however, speakers at this conference presented evidence to the contrary.
Writing an article about getting started with Perl is a bit like writing an article about getting started with neurosurgery. Sure, I could cover some basics -- but it would only leave you scratching your head the first time something comes up that you've never seen. I'd hate to see a neurosurgeon in that position! But no matter what you do, there are always times when you just don't know an answer. A much more horrible fate to suffer is to have no clue where to go to find the answer. So, this article covers one or two basics of Perl, just to show you that's it's not so scary, and a future article will tell you where to find solutions when you're on your own.