Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

Perl Applications and Tools

Notes: Those pages are written by people for whom English is not a native language. Some amount of grammar and spelling errors should be expected. This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site. It cannot replace the best teachers and the best books. The site contain some obsolete pages as it develops like a living tree... Some links on older pages are broken. Please try to use Google, Open directory, etc. to find a replacement link (see HOWTO search the WEB for details). We would appreciate if you can mail us a correct link. Search Amazon by keywords:     Open directory Research Index

Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov

Recommended Links

Search engines:

• Open Directory - Computers Programming Languages Perl -- this is my favorite source of links.
• Yahoo Perl links
• Perl Crawler Search Engine - specialized, but rather weak

Top sites:

• Perl.com  The official Perl home page, run by O'Reilly
  • perl.com Documentation
  • Perl FAQ Index see also Perl FAQ Index
• perl.oreilly.com -- Welcome to the O'Reilly Perl Center -- computer books, perl books, perl programming
• The Perl Directory - perl.org
• CPAN
• Perldoc.com - Perl Documentation
• Perl Monks - The Monastery Gates

Reference: see below

See also

• Tcl/Tk
• Shells

Bookshelf

• Shells
• Algorithms

Top community sites:

• Perl Mongers Perl user groups -- Perl mongers
• Perl Monks - The Monastery Gates
• The Perl Mailing List Database
• dev.perl.org  - development portal
  • dev.perl.org - Perl 6
  • Perl 5
• use Perl  - contains decent blog. Useful news.
• PerlRing Homepage
• UF-NA Perl Archive
• Welcome to the Perl Archive
• Matt's Script Archive, Inc. Free Perl CGI Scripts

Products, projects and resources:

• ActiveState - Applied Open Source
  • Visual Perl
  • ActiveState - ActiveState - Products - Productivity Tools - Komodo -- OK IDE. Editor still sucks (very basic in v. 2.0 to be precise), but debugger is OK.  See also a positively biased review Review of Komodo 2,0  by Simon Cozens.
  • PerlMx -- procmail style Spam filter; still very raw but useful for low traffic sites.
• DzSoft Perl Editor   - A very decent shareware editor with elements of IDE. Contains built-in beautifier ! by Sergey Dzyubenko, Alexander Dzyubenko, DzSoft Ltd.
• libwww-perl  -- for those who do not like cgi.pm ;-)
• mod_perl Welcome to the mod_perl world
• Embperl
• The CGI Resource Index Programs and Scripts Perl
• bioperl.org - Main page
• Mother of Perl Free Perl Tutorials, Tips, Lessons, Tricks, and Code - Webreference.com
• FREEPerlCode.com - Hundreds of FREE Perl Scripts with Source Code

People:

• Larry Wall
• Lincoln Stein's Home Page
  • CGI.pm - a Perl5 CGI Library  -- it's an official CGI library but I do not like it.  See libwww-perl   as a possible alternative
• M-J. Dominus Perl Paraphernalia
• Rex Swain's HTMLified Perl 5 Reference Guide
• Randal L. Schwartz -- the author of a very weak book "Learning Perl on Win23" :-). But he is better that this book ;-)
  • WT Columns by Randal
• Perl 5 by Example by David Medinets
• Steve Litts PERLs of Wisdom -- by Steve Litt.
• Damian Conway -- it you can survive this green on black layout, some info might be useful; but most is obscure  ;-)
• Perl Programming by Don Brutzman
• Joseph Hall Effective Perl Programming
• Perl Scripts
• Perl Recipes
• My little world in Perl Examples
• Dale Bewley's Perl Scripts and Links
• Cliff's Perl Script Collection

Press:

• perl.oreilly.com
• The Perl Journal
• The Perl Review

Reference

Perl Man Pages on the WEB

• perl.com Documentation
• Perldoc.com - Perl Documentation  by by Carlos Ramirez

• http://www-cgi.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/perl-man

• http://www.aisd.com/technology/perl/man/

• http://www.mit.edu:8001/perl/perl.html

• http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/doc/manual/html/   - Perl documentation

• Perl Manual

• html format -- in tar

Perl Reference Guide & Perl 5 Desktop Guide   see also mirror Perl5 Reference Guide

Perl Recipes

FAQs and the Manual

See also Perl FAQ Index .Beginning with Perl version 5.004, the Perl distribution itself includes the Perl FAQ.

• perl manual
• Perl Meta-FAQ
• The Perl FAQ - Split by Question (Tom Christiansen & Nathan Torkington)
• Perl FAQ Index (Tom Christiansen & Stephen P. Potter)
• Perl CGI Programming FAQ (Shishir Gundavaram & Tom Christiansen)
• Perl / CGI FAQ: The Idiot's Guide to Solving Perl CGI Problems (Tom Christiansen)
• Perl for Win32 FAQ (Evangelo Prodromou)
• Perl/Tk FAQ (Peter Prymmer)  - The Tk extension to Perl 5 - Frequently Asked & Answered Questions.
• Idiot's Guide to Solving PerlCGI Problems
• Perl modules file
• TOC

Perl philosophy and history

See also  Softpanorama Hall of Fame -- Larry Wall

• Web Review - Perl   -- Short history of Perl

• The June 2001 issue of Fast Company Magazine, page 156, features Perl as being one of the "best-of-the-best innovations

  What: The Perl programming language
  When: December 18, 1987
  Where: Santa Monica, California
  Who: Larry Wall, former employee of Unisys Corp., currently affiliated with O'Reilly & Associates Inc.

  The Internet economy has its share of stars, from John Chambers to Steve Case. The Perl programming language also deserves a place in the pantheon of Web heroes. Known as the "duct tape of the Internet," Perl has been hailed as the single most important tool for expanding Web sites quickly and for minimizing development times. More than half of the sites on the Web are built using Perl as the foundation, or "glue," that holds together text files and other applications.

  How Perl was created, and how it works, is as important as what it does. Perl is a poster child for the open-source software revolution -- volunteer programmers from all over the world work to make it better. And unlike most computer languages, which are based on a strict logic and prescribe a single "right" way to code for an outcome, Perl was created by linguist Larry Wall to mimic natural languages. "There are many ways to say the same thing, depending on what you're optimizing for -- elegance, speed, simplicity," says Wall. This allows Perl programmers a large measure of creative expression in the way that they build sites -- a quality not often found in computer coding.

  Like any major computer innovation, Perl has its share of quirks and eccentricities. For example, the most popular physical symbol of this software triumph is . . . the camel. Years ago, O'Reilly & Associates put a camel on the cover of Programming Perl, the bible of Perl developers everywhere. The camel has become so popular that the O'Reilly Web site devotes a section to the ways in which the finer points of trademark law apply to the Perl camel.

  It's one of the many indications of the cultlike following that has sprung up around the language. Wall encourages the culture, in whatever strange forms it may take. "With my linguistics background, I've learned that a language without a culture is a dead language," he says. "Encouraging programmers to feel creative in their coding process means that there is a real base of mind power there when we go out and ask them to help us solve technical problems with Perl."
  --Alison Overholt

• PERL.COM - The Final Day at The Perl Conference

• An Overview of Perl  -- from Programming Perl, 2nd Edition

• Perl Culture

• Evolutionary Changes in Freeware -- An edited excerpt from Larry Wall's Keynote Address at 1997 Perl Conference.  Web Review, Apr. 10, 1998

• Web Review -- Interview with Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen

• Perl versus .... - some comparative language discussions. Includes Perl versus tcl, python, java, and others.

• The Perl "Artistic License"

Introduction and Tutorials

Several books are available online: see Perlbooks.  Please consult PERL Reference for a more complete list of tutorials. It does not make sense to try to learn Perl from WEB tutorials or, God forbid, from the Perl manual.  Perl books. including books from www.mcp.com are much more appropriate (but please avoid  popular Learning Perl and Learning Perl on Win32  twins :-).

Actually there are few good online tutorials on Perl.

• Practical Perl Programming by A. D. Marshall 1999

• Picking Up Perl, a Freely Redistributable Perl Tutorial Book. a small tutorial currently it is in version 0.11.

• Perl by Example -- online book by David Medinets  More like a reference then tutorial. Still it's one of the few published books available online.

Some Perl Books sites

Please note that all O'Reilly Perl books have one chapter online. Those chapters are a nice complement to full online books.

• The CGI/Perl Cookbook
• Effective Perl Programming -- contains several chapters online,  see Table of Contents
• Mastering Regular Expressions
• Perl 5 Interactive Course

• **** http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlsysadm/chapter/ch09.html Chapter 9 of "Perl for System Administration" online. Chapter 9 is an in-depth look at one of the more common system administrator's duties: sifting through log files.

  The chapter covers everything from basic syslog, text only log files to Microsoft NT, binary log files and how to interpret them using Perl. David N. Blank-Edelman does more than just explain how to grok the files, he addresses several other problems, such as log file rotation and stateful vs stateless data. There is also a very detailed section on log file analysis. He covers several different algorithms for analyzing the logs and turning them into useful data. Also, he addresses the use of databases in the logfile analysis process.

Reviews

• Learning Perl on Win32 Systems By Randal L. Schwartz, Erik Olson & Tom Christiansen  -- buy this book only if it is discounted 50% or more
   
• Effective Perl Programming Reviews

As for WEB tutorial IMHO only explanation of a particular language features can probably be useful.

• What is Scalar Context? -- Every Perl expression is in one of two contexts, either list context or scalar context, depending on whether it is expected to produce a list or a scalar. Many expressions have quite different behaviors in list context than they do in scalar context.
• Perl objects by Tom Christiansen (1996). Contains rather restrictive and hostile copyright notice. Not that impressive.
• switch_statements
• The FMTEYEWTK series -- Far More Than Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know About... This series contains a set of documents that address perl-related certain topic areas in depth. They range from nothing but simple copies of somewhat lengthy news postings to real, full-blown, htmlified, complete tutorials.

Regular expressions (see special section devoted to this important feature below)

References

• Understand References Today --  One of the most important new features in Perl 5 was the capability to manage complicated data structures like multidimensional arrays and nested hashes. To enable these, Perl 5 introduced a feature called `references', and using references is the key to managing complicated, structured data in Perl. Unfortunately, there's a lot of funny syntax to learn, and the manual is not as clear in this area as it usually is. The manual is quite complete, and a lot of people find that a problem, because it can be hard to tell what is important and what isn't.

General

• Getting Started With Perl -- Jukka Korpela
• Introduction to Perl -- University of Missouri - Columbia 20 April 1999
• Practical Perl Programming by A. D. Marshall 1999
• Introduction to Perl by Patrick M. Ryan  -- 1993
• MEET PERL by  M-J. Dominus - rather old article
• A Perl 4 Workshop
• An Introduction To Perl by Gary Major
• Perl tutorial Start
• Introduction to Perl -- MU Campus Computing Short Course
• Civil Engineering 82.562 -- The Perl Programming Language
• Perl and CGI Scripting
• iupui.edu An Introduction to PERL - slides
• Module 3 (Intro to PERL

See also modules, regular expressions

• Namespaces: Coping with Scoping
• The Seven Useful Uses of local
• Perl Module Mechanics
• perltoot - Tom Christiansen's object-oriented tutorial for perl\
• Precedence Problems
• What is Scalar Context
• Randal's columns
  • Linux Magazine DEPARTMENTS PERL OF WISDOM
    • Linux Magazine April 2000 PERL OF WISDOM An Object Lesson in Perl
  • Randal's UnixReview-PerformanceComputing-SysAdmin columns
• Perl System's Seminar
• M-J. Dominus Perl Paraphernalia
• Abigail's Perl stuff
• Illustrated guide to Perl internals   by Gisle Aas's
• The Taming of the Camel
• 5 Sigma Perl Page - maintained by Joseph Hall, the author of  Effective Perl Programming (see below)
• Effective Perl Programming --   Information on Joseph's book from Addison-Wesley, as some Perl programming goodies. See also Addison-Wesley page.
• Ventura Web PGPMail (version 1.200) Primary Distribution Site
• Steve's Object Oriented Perl Page

Editors

VIM has (limited) support of Perl. See Softpanorama VI Editor Links

***** DzSoft Perl Editor 3.1 Very decent shareware editor with elements of Integrated environment. Contains built-in beautifier ! by Sergey Dzyubenko, Alexander Dzyubenko, DzSoft Ltd.

• Fully customizable Syntax Highlighting!
• Run the script with any parameters and see the result in the internal browser.
• All features are available offline.
• No need to run a web server on your computer to test the script!
• Syntax Check feature.
• Multi-line quick insert feature.
• NEW:STDIN support.
• Simple FTP client included to upload and chmod your script.
• HTML Export with syntax highlighting.
• Super comfortable editor with bookmarks.
• SDI interface that supports multiple instances.
• Print feature with Syntax Highlighting.
• Windows/Unix/Mac line endings support.
• Complete Perl Help included to browse offline.
• Windows 2000 100% compatible.
• Script parameters editor.
• Environment Variables Editor.

Perl Scripting Tool PRO Perl Made Easy Win32 editor.

NOTE: This is beta software. If you are not entirely comfortable using beta software, DO NOT install this version on your PC. We strongly recommend that BEFORE you install this software, you  make a backup copy of your existing PST folder and put that copy in a separate area.  Do not be alarmed if there is a big jump in beta build numbers; gaps exists because we create frequent internal builds. This is one of a series of beta releases of Perl Scripting Tool 2.00. As with any beta software, some features may not be fully implemented. If you find any problems with this software, please send us a bug report to: bugs@perlscriptingtool.com .

Perl Editors

ped A text editor with an emacs/vi-like user interface written in perl.[July 17, 1999]
Jul 08th 1999, 21:24 stable: none - devel: 0.1.2 license: Artistic

TkFileman Home Page

Perl::Tk

ptkpad.0.6.5.tar.gz
    This is an implementation of my Tk NotePad only it is done in Perl::Tk. The implementation is progressing quite fast and most of the features have been implemented. Currently the only features that have not been implemented are some keystroke bindings.
    Unfortunately there are a few bugs and is considered a beta release now, so please do not complain about bugs> I will welcome bug fixes. It originaly started out as a line by line conversion, but as I learn more about perl I am starting to optimize as well but this is a low priority.
   Some features that have been added in addition to what is in my original TkNotePad are the New Window Menu item, as well as a line and column indicator to tell the position of the cursor, and a goto line. I have also added an Options menu for changing a few things like the fonts. Many more features are planned. screenshot

PurePerl.org

Namespaces and Modules

• Namespaces. See also Namespaces: Coping with Scoping
• Perl Module Anatomy  by Steven McDougall. Short and not very informative notes about the contents of the .pm file
• The very very short tutorial about modules in Perl [ New: 06/16/99 ]Mark-Jason Dominus a really short tutorial about Perl Modules.
• The Seven Useful Uses of local
• Perl Module Mechanics
• perltoot - Tom Christiansen's object-oriented tutorial for perl
• IBM developerWorks: Parsing with Perl modules(Apr 30, 2000)

Networking

[Oct. 07, 2000] A special module IPC-Run by Barrie Slaymaker(barries@slaysys.com). After a user's spun up on bash/ksh, it provides useful piping constructs, subprocesses, and either expect-like or event loop oriented I/O capabilities.

www.perl.com Perl Reference/Networking

www.perl.com - You want to find the IP address of a host or turn an IP address into a name. Recipe of the Day

[Feb 20, 2000] pftp pFtp is a ftp client written in perl. It uses the Perl/Tk and Libnet libraries, both available from the CPAN FTP site. Download: pFtp 0.05

[Jan 28, 2000] DDJ EXAMINING PERLDAP  by Troy Neeriemer

Netscape's PerLDAP is an important tool for both programmers and administrators because it provides a mechanism for accessing directory information from Perl. Troy presents a high-level overview of PerLDAP, along with details of how you can use it. Additional resources include perldap.txt (listings) and perldap.zip (source code).

File managers

Paw (Perl ASCII Widgets) is a widgetset for generating a GUI on ASCII based terminals. It contains button, radiobutton, label, line, listbox, text_entry, pull-down-menu, filedialog, popup-box and more. Examples are included. This
software requires Perl::Curses.

[Apr 18, 2001] Drall -- Stable version 1.4.0.0. Much better that it was and now supports authentication using the same author's Averist module. Written in Perl (GNU license) Screenshots:

• Login 

• Dual-panel view 

• Rename a directory and a file 

• Upload a file 

• Make a directory

Here is the quote from the author page:

If you like Drall, please express your satisfaction with a donation: send me what you feel Drall has been worth to you. If you are glad that I developed Drall and distribute it as free software, rather than following the obstructive and antisocial practices typical of software developers, reward me. If you would like me to develop more free software, contribute.

Scripts Archives

• CPAN

•  

Etc

• Perl code to implement Robot Exclusion Standard

CGI Scripts

• Lincoln Stein's Home Page CGI and Perl scripts from the author of cgi.pm
• Free-Scripts.Net -- big and pretty decent archive
• http://www.metronet.com/1/perlinfo/scripts/
• Scriptsearch THE WORLD'S LARGEST CGI LIBRARY searchable archive (both Perl and shell,…)
• Matt's Script Archive Huge page.
• Perl tools for download
• Shell Script of the Month many good examples.
• The Perl Oasis all around Perl.
• John Cameron scripts
• Perl Scripts and Links by Dale Bewley
  Code2HTML converts a program source code to syntax highlighted HTML.

Conferences

Second Perl conference [added November 4, 1998]

• What you missed at Perl Conference 2.0 - SunWorld - September 1998
• 98 Perl Conference - Perl Conference 3.0 -- The Call for Participation

Etc

perl.com Critique of the Perl 6 RFC Process [Oct. 31, 2000]

Perl Shell

The Perl Shell is a shell that combines the interactive nature of a Unix shell with the power of Perl. The goal is to eventually have a full featured shell that behaves as expected for normal shell activity. But, the Perl Shell will use Perl syntax and functionality for for control-flow statements and other things.

http://www.focusresearch.com/gregor/psh/

[fm] Perl shell 0.003

Perl Shell 0.003 Gregor N. Purdy - November 23rd 1999, 18:03 EST

The Perl Shell (psh) is an interactive command-line Unix shell that aims to bring the benefits of Perl scripting to a shell context and the shell's interactive execution model to Perl.

Changes: This version of the Perl Shell adds significant functionality. However, it is still an early development release. New features include rudimentary background jobs handling and job management, signal handling, filename completion, updates to history handling, flexible %built_ins mechanism for adding built-in functions and smart mode is now on by default.

• Perl Mongers Starting a Group -- the site devoted to Perl user groups
• Apache/Perl Integration Project - allows one to write Apache modules entirely in Perl.
• CORBA Perl Project (COPE).

Last updated: March 15, 2008