The authors share this assessment of the Perl programming language by its founder, Larry Known as the "camel" language, "Perl may not look good, or smell good, but it gets the job done." Whether using Perl as a text processing, networking, system administration, and/or Web scripting language, in-depth guidance with examples aid with setting up the Perl environment, variables, structures and operators, functions and scope, regular expressions, object-oriented programming, debugging, creating CGI scripts from existing tools, and a Perl spreadsheet. The accompanying CD-ROM contains the new Perl compiler, source code, Net and Windows 95 modules. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.