Practical Extraction and Report Language (Perl) is one of the most widely used languages for Web programming today. Larry Wall began developing this high-level programming language in 1987. His initial goal was to create a programming language to monitor large software projects and generate reports. The other goals are that Perl would be more powerful than shell scripting and more flexible than C and it should consist of many rich text-processing capabilities and most of all, it should make common programming tasks straightforward and easy.

Perl is a general purpose scripting language, but has achieved special prominence in certain application areas. One of these is Web scripting, where Perl is probably the most popular language in use today. This popularity is due largely to the strength of its text processing capabilities, which Perl makes easy. As most of the information users send to Web servers is text, Perl became a logical choice for CGI programming due to its simple, yet powerful, text processing capabilities. It is useful for writing everything from report generators to graphical tools to interactive Web-based applications. Perl's popularity means that many programmers are already familiar with it and fluent in its use.

Another particular advantage offered by Perl is the wealth of add-on software available for it in the form of modules that provide additional capabilities. The CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) implements the support structure for access to all of this software. It's an extensive resource that saves us time and effort by providing code that we need not have to write ourself. One of the most important MySQL-related modules in the CPAN is DBI, which provides database access from within Perl scripts to several database engines in a database-independent manner. DBI provides a standard programming interface to developers so we need not be concerned with database-dependent details that are handled behind the scenes by database-specific modules that support individual engines. This approach allows us to write scripts that access MySQL easily and that can be ported to and from other databases with a minimal effort.

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