Welcome. This site is the official headquarters for the San Antonio, Texas chapter of Perl Mongers, the Perl users' group.

What is Perl?
Perl is an extremely flexible scripting language that literally holds the Worldwide Web together. It's cross-platform, in that it is normally executed on the server side and thus doesn't care what platform the client is using. There are many talented programmers working far into the night to improve Perl, as well as to develop modules to increase its usefulness. Perl is especially good at manipulating string data, and its regular expression handling is second to none. Thanks to the aforementioned hardworking programmers, however, Perl is now also a graphical user interface and a "data interchange" engine that allows once disparate applications to talk to one another. Perl has few limitations in CGI or other environments appropriate to scripting; it can even be compiled to C!

In short, Perl can probably work for you, whatever your needs.

Perl Programming for Schools: As a public service to San Antonio area schools and nonprofit organizations, I'd like to offer the SA Perl Mongers' services. Contact me if you need programming or information systems technology help at your school or civic organization. I'll see what I can arrange. I can't promise that we'll be able to fulfill every request, but I'll sure give it a shot.

Meetings: Quite frankly, there hasn't been enough interest expressed in meetings for me to schedule any, at present. If you would like to see meetings on either a regular or occasional basis, let me know.

Here is a concise introduction to Perl I call Robert's Quick-n-Dirty Perl Tutorial. It's still in the early stages, but I thought I'd share those parts I have completed. Check back often for the latest additions.

Unix

For Unix systems I recommend FermiLab's NEdit, a great little text editor that recognizes and provides programming tools for a variety of languages, including Perl. Features token matching, one of the most useful tools imaginable. I don't remember how I coded in Perl before NEdit ;-)

MS Win32 Environments

The best freeware tool I've found for Win32 is CodeMagic. It has lots of features; unfortunately, token matching isn't one of them (yet). Nevertheless, it's well worth downloading.

Here is a collection of some my Perl scripts, written to perform various sysadmin tasks over the years.

CGI script security risks: problems with nulls in Perl CGI scripts. From Phrack 55.

A list of annoying Internet Hoaxes.

Download the latest Perl release(s), in either binary or source code form.

perl.org: Until 1 March 1999 this was the home of the Perl Institute, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to keeping Perl freely available and to providing resources related to Perl for the programming community. It is now part of Perl Mongers, but it remains one of the preeminent places to learn about or download information concerning Perl.

perl.com: The headquarters for commercially-supported Perl, but also probably the best overall Perl site in existence. Here you'll find suggestions, tutorials, hints, tips, news from the Perl community, and a lot more. The one indispensible Perl bookmark.

Perl Mongers: The home site for the Perl Users' Group. Book reviews, Perl Mongers apparel (a must for the devoted Monger) and links to other Mongers. We're everywhere, and still growing...

CPAN: The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network is a repository for scripts, modules, documentation, and other information (including various incarnations of the Perl FAQ). If you need a script or module (or just to RTFM), this be da place.

The Perl Journal. The official Journal of the Perl Development Community since 1996. Subscribe today!

Some fascinating articles by Teodor Zlatanov over at IBM's Linux developerWorks on constructing genetic algorithms in Perl (one of my pet projects):
Cultured Perl: Genetic algorithms applied with Perl
Cultured Perl: Genetic algorithms, the next generation