Sami Posted June 5, 2010 Share Posted June 5, 2010 What does Perl do?What can I use it for?Is it worth learning it?Does anybody know any good tutorial?Is it included in the LAMP(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_%28software_bundle%29) package? If not, how can I install it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Synook Posted June 6, 2010 Share Posted June 6, 2010 Perl is a scripting language. You can use it to write executable programs, shell scripts, and construct pre-processed web pages.Is it worth learning? Well... it is a useful scripting language, and is quite simple, but it is a bit outdated and you may be better off learning Ruby, or similar. However, it won't be a waste of time!The P in LAMP may stand for Perl... but more usually it is PHP nowadays. There is an Apache module for it, however. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeffman Posted June 6, 2010 Share Posted June 6, 2010 For a long time, Perl was the scripting language for the web. This is because it is the scripting language for automating tasks in the Unix environment. Because the first webservers existed only on Unix machines, it made sense to use Perl for web scripting.But it was never designed to be a web scripting language, and future revisions are not designed to make it more web-friendly. 3rd-party libraries help Perl adapt to the web. But it's a bit of a hassle to <include> all kinds of files to do everyday jobs like parsing POST data.I was a Perl scripter until I learned PHP. My only relationship with Perl today is to occasionally update very old scripts that are not worth the time it would take to rewrite them in PHP. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skaterdav85 Posted August 4, 2010 Share Posted August 4, 2010 Why is Perl usually associated with CGI? What is CGI anyways? All i know is that it stand for common gateway interface. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Synook Posted August 4, 2010 Share Posted August 4, 2010 The Common Gateway Interface provides an interface between a scripting language and a web server. It accepts requests for content from the web server, invokes scripts, and returns the results to the server, in the same way that mod_rewrite enables PHP to work with Apache.Perl and most other scripting languages by itself cannot interact directly with HTTP requests (unless you write a server using it...), but using the CGI they can. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skaterdav85 Posted August 4, 2010 Share Posted August 4, 2010 so what is CGI written in? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Synook Posted August 6, 2010 Share Posted August 6, 2010 CGI is more of a specification than an actual program, though most implementations are probably written in C++. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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