Description

---

The Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (Perl), has grown to be one of the most powerful and popular scripting languages. Combining the best features of C, UNIX utilities, and regular expressions, these days Perl is used for an array of tasks, including system administration, text processing and Web programming. Recently, it's been used for more exotic areas like bioinformatics. Perl is supported by all of the most prominent operating systems, including Windows, Unix, OS/2, Amiga, and others.

About the Author

---

Andy Lester has been a professional programmer for 19 years and Perl evangelist for a decade. As one of the core Perl developers, Andy's interests in Perl focus on quality assurance. He maintains eight testing modules on the CPAN, as well as the Perl QA Web site. Andy is a frequent speaker at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, YAPC and Perl Monger meetings around the country. He's spoken on a variety of programming topics including automated testing, Perl security, Web agent automation, project management and effective job searching for programmers. Andy has written or edited a dozen books. Three of his articles on his popular WWW:: Mechanize module are included in O'Reilly's Spidering Hacks. Andy has also written articles for every single Perl magazine published in the US (all two of them). By day, Andy manages a crack squad of Web programmers for Follett Library Resources in McHenry, Illinois. He lives with his wife, Amy, daughter Quinn, and Baxter, the world's neediest do