This complete guide to the Perl programming language ranges widely through the Perl programmer's universe, gathering together in a convenient form a wealth of information about Perl itself and its application to CGI scripts, XML processing, network programming, database interaction, and graphical user interfaces. The book is an ideal reference for experienced Perl programmers and beginners alike.

With more than a million dedicated programmers, Perl is proving to be the best language for the latest trends in computing and business, including network programming and the ability to create and manage web sites. It's a language that every Unix system administrator and serious web developer needs to know. In the past few years, Perl has found its way into complex web applications of multinational banks, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and hundreds of large corporations.

In this second edition, Perl in a Nutshell has been expanded to include coverage of Perl 5.8, with information on Unicode processing in Perl, new functions and modules that have been added to the core language, and up-to-date details on running Perl on the Win32 platform. The book also covers Perl modules for recent technologies such as XML and SOAP.

Here are just some of the topics contained in this book:

• Basic Perl reference
• Quick reference to built-in functions and standard modules
• CGI.pm and mod_perl
• XML::* modules
• DBI, the database-independent API for Perl
• Sockets programming
• LWP, the library for Web programming in Perl
• Network programming with the Net modules
• Perl/Tk, the Tk extension to Perl for graphical interfaces
• Modules for interfacing with Win32 systems

As part of the successful "in a Nutshell" book series from O'Reilly & Associates, Perl in a Nutshell is for readers who want a single reference for all their needs.

"In a nutshell, Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible."

 -- Larry Wall, creator of Perl