A guide to a carefully designed subset of the Perl language, this book makes Perl more accessible to those having UNIX/Linux skill levels ranging from elementary to expert by capitalizing on their existing knowledge of important utilities (grep, awk), or essential concepts (filters, command substitution, looping). Dozens of detailed programming examples are shown, drawn from contemporary application areas such as system administration, networking, Web development, databases, finance, HTML, CGI, and text analysis. Broken into two parts, the first is for all who are familiar with core UNIX/Linux commands such as grep and caters to readers ranging from managers and administrative staff to advanced programmers. The second part is for developers experienced in Bourne, Korn, Bash, or POSIX Shell programming and makes Perl scripting easy to learn by showing Shell examples along with their Perl counterparts. Many Perl modules are covered including freely available pre-written code from the CPAN.