Perl for Web Site Management

Preface

This book is about getting your job done. More specifically, it’s about getting your job done more quickly, effectively, and enjoyably, especially if your job includes building and maintaining useful collections of information on the World Wide Web. Finally, and most importantly, it’s about getting these things done using the Perl programming language.

What this book is not about is everything else; it’s not about how to write HTML well, design professional-looking images, or create an effective navigation scheme for your web site. Nor is it about how to configure your web server software, perform basic system administration tasks, or maintain your web site’s Internet connection. I assume you already know those things, can find out about them somewhere else, or can find someone else to do them for you. Finally, this book is not about how to create a large web site using some sort of point-and-click web authoring application. Instead, my assumption is that you want to learn how to build your own web publishing solutions using the simple, flexible, and freely available tools that have built many of the most useful sites on the Web today.

On the most fundamental level, this book is about learning to move beyond the world of the computer user, and to begin moving toward the world of the computer programmer. That’s a big journey, with many stages, and this book does not pretend to take you all the way to the end. Instead, it concentrates on the first few steps, doing its best to guide you past the more obvious pitfalls. How far you end up going depends on your particular needs and aptitude. This book is about helping you make a good start.

Intended Audience

This book assumes that you are experienced with computers, though not necessarily with Unix, or with programming. You are enthusiastic about the Web as a communications medium, and know the basics (at least) of creating web sites, but would like to take your efforts to the next level. You might be responsible for a small-business web site, or be part of a team working on larger-scale web projects. Perhaps you are putting content on a company intranet. Maybe you are a hobbyist, building a web site for the local soccer league. You might be educated in a traditional computer science discipline, but you’re just as likely to have a noncomputer background as a teacher, writer, artist, or anything, really.

This book grows from my own experience. A few years ago I made my own transition from a career as a writer and editor to a much more rapidly moving career at the center of an expanding collection of commercial web projects. It has been an exciting journey, involving a nonstop learning process. When I think about the last few years, I don’t feel that I’ve been climbing a learning curve so much as scaling a near-vertical learning cliff, and when I look down at my starting point the difference between here and there is sobering (just as it is sobering for me to look upward, to the heights where the real experts reside).

I thought about this the other day, as I was explaining to a co-worker how I used a 30-line Perl script to create several hundred web pages based on a page design of hers, doing in a few minutes what it would have taken her (or me, not long ago) many days, even weeks, to accomplish with manual HTML coding. “How did you learn this stuff?” she asked. It reminded me of the Arthur C. Clarke saying: for the uninitiated, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

If you’d like to work that kind of magic—writing programs to automate repetitive tasks, updating page designs throughout your site in just a few seconds, and building vast arrays of web-based information from arbitrarily formatted source data—this book is for you.