Perl/CGI Overview

Perl, by definition, is a general purpose, interactive and dynamic programming language which falls under the category of high level programming language. It was originally developed by a linguist named Larry Wall in the year 1987. It was originally developed as a general purpose programming language for UNIX operating system. The intention behind its development was to make the report processing, in UNIX, easier. After its first introduction in 1987, it has evolved over the years and various versions of Perl have been released. It became really famous amongst programmers. The latest version of Perl developed under the supervision of Larry Wall is Perl 6.

Books

Perl was meant to handle only text manipulation tasks but over the time, it incorporated many features and today it is used for a variety of tasks that may include web development, network programming, Graphical User Interface development and system administration as well. One interesting fact about Perl is that it has borrowed various features of different popular programming languages like C, Lisp, and AWK etc. Perl provides really strong data manipulation tools that make it one of the ideal languages to handle text files. Apart from handling text files, it is also used today more often for graphics programming, CGI programming on the web and for many other reasons. Do you know that Perl is nicknamed as the Swiss Army Knife of the programming languages; it is because of the fact that Perl is very flexible and adaptive.