See how the Template Toolkit simplifies the process of building and managing web site content. Examples illustrate the use of template variables and template components that allow web content to be constructed in a modular fashion. Other topics include managing the site structure, generating menus and other navigation components, and defining and using complex data. More info

Two Perl modules (Getopt and Getoptions::Long) work to extract program flags and arguments much like Getopt and Getopts do for shell programming. The Perl modules, especially GetOptions::Long, are much more powerful and flexible. More info

One of Perl's better-kept secrets is its built-in debugger, a powerful utility that allows developers to rapidly track down errors in their Perl scripts. This article introduces you to the Perl debugger, explaining how to use it to step through scripts, set breakpoints, inspect variables and objects, watch expressions and perform stack traces. More info

A good tutorial for those with basic programming experience in languages such as C++ and Fortran. teach basic data structures, flow control, and string manipulation in the context of writing a common CGI program for a Web server. More info

Perl has wonderful I/O capabilities. I'm only going to cover input here: reading from files or standard input. There are two ways to do that (actually a lot more than two, but this is supposed to be introductory material): you can open a specific file, or you can pass files on the command line and either open them individually or just ignore the whole thing and pretend everything is coming from STDIN. More info

This page is designed to help novice programmers learn the Perl programming language. Specifically, it's designed to help them learn enough to run CGI scripts on a Unix Web server. More info

A good source for beginners to the PERL language. More info

In this installment, Ted looks at Perl and databases. Specifically, he works with the Class::DBI CPAN module and MySQL to introduce you to embedding Perl in database tables. Databases and the applications that use them are essential to today's computing infrastructures. They are everywhere, from plain-text databases such as the UNIX /etc/passwd file to large databases such as those that track shopping habits or fight credit card fraud. More info

Recently I had a project that required a number of different programs that will mostly run all the time, but need to be restarted now and then with different parameters. Normally, the first thing I think of for a program that runs constantly is inittab or svc (daemontools). The svc facility is the more flexible of the two, and will be what I'll use in the final design, but in the "thinking" stages I played with using a Perl program launcher and controller. What we have is a config file that specifies programs. More info

A introduction to the Perl DBI, write more portable database coding. More info