Perl 101 (Part 1) - The Basics (
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Known as much for its confusing, often oddball, syntax as for its
efficiency and speed, Perl has a mystique that very few languages can
match. This first article in a new series gives novice and intermediate
programmers an introduction to the basics of the language.If you're a Web programmer, you're probably already well-versed with the
intricacies of client-side scripting. But where there's a client, there must be
a server - and so, this week, DevShed is kicking off a series of tutorials on
server-side scripting. With power such as this, young Jedi, there is no limit to
the evil you will be capable of...
First, though, let's start with the
basics.
Server-side scripting is not new. It's been around for quite a
while on the Web, and almost every major Web site uses some amount of
server-side scripting. Amazon.com uses it to find the book you're looking for,
Yahoo! uses it to store your personal preferences, and GeoCities uses it to
generate page statistics.
Despite this, you're probably wondering why
server-side scripting is such a big deal - after all, you've probably seen what
a few simple JavaScripts can do. The reason for its popularity is very simple -
JavaScript runs within a client application, usually the browser, and as such
can only access resources, such as the current date and time, on the client
machine. Since server-side scripts run on the Web server, they can be used to
access server resources such as databases, system variables and other useful
thingamajigs.
Just as there are different flavours of client-side
scripting, there are different languages which can be used on the server as
well. Here's a quick list of some of the more popular ones:
Active Server
Pages [
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/server/asp/ASPover.asp]
was introduced by Microsoft in its IIS Web server, ostensibly for the purpose of
"web application programming". While ASP currently runs only on the Windows
server platform, plans are afoot to port it to the UNIX platform as
well.
Next up, ColdFusion, developed by Allaire [
http://www.allaire.com]. ColdFusion syntax
bears a remarkable resemblance to HTML, making it very easy for a budding web
programmer to migrate to it. At the moment, it's available for both Windows NT
and Linux. The only drawback: it ain't free, McGee!
Python [
http://www.python.org] is an interpreted,
object-oriented high-level scripting language for UNIX, often compared to Tcl,
Perl or Java. It has modules, classes and interfaces to system calls, and is
also extensible. It has been ported to Windows, DOS, OS/2 and the Macintosh, and
has a devout following in the UNIX community.
And then there's the
current flavour of the month, PHP [
http://www.php.net]. Very easy to use, it's free,
widely available for UNIX systems, and particularly strong in the areas of
database access. The latest version is PHP4, and a final release is expected
shortly.
And finally, Perl, one of the most popular languages around [and
the language used throughout this tutorial - such is fame!]. Here's how its
creator, Larry Wall, describes it: "PERL, an acronym for Practical Extraction
and Report Language, is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary
text files, extracting information from these files, and printing reports based
on that information. It is also a good language for many system management
tasks. The language is intended to be practical - easy to use, efficient, and
complete - rather than beautiful - tiny, elegant, and minimal.
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