If you would like to add interactive elements such as forms or drop-down lists to your site, you may want to rely on Practical Extraction and Report Language (Perl). You don’t necessarily need to enroll in a Perl class at your local community college. There are plenty of tutorials on the Web.
Decherd’s Perl 101 primer is a great place to start. Not only does it give the history of Perl, but it also explains how Perl can be used alone or in conjunction with CGI. For additional reference, check out the list of Perl-related sites.
Perl.com has plenty of basic information about the language, as well as FAQS, news, and links to everything from the Perl Institute to Bug Reports.
Want to get an idea of how Perl works? Read up on My Favorite Perl Functions, a story in Web Review dedicated to the most “useful and often underused” functions, such as chomp, join, push, split, and unlink (you will have to read the article to find out what these mean).
Builder has a great feature called Cool Web Solutions With Perl, which explains everything from how to embed Perl Script in HTML to how to make the most of Mac Perl. It also offers a good general overview of the language.
Web Monkey’s Perl Scripts for Beginners is a few years old, but that doesn’t mean it should be overlooked. Web Monkey’s tutorials are great in that not only are they well written but they show you how to use Perl step by step and they offer sample script.
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