Web Technologies in a Nutshell - PERL
PERL is a relatively old technology which is being overtaken by Java tidal wave.
Still PERL has significantly better Systems and Document handling capability than Java
- Very good for UNIX as much easier than Shell for system scripts -- PC versions exist but not so well integrated into O/S
- Wonderful regular expression handling
PERL is traditional but probably not best choice for server CGI extensions and development of filters
-- except for simpler cases involving text documents
PERL5 is object oriented but much less elegant (in my opinion) than Java
- PERL5 has very useful multidimensional associative and regular arrays
PERL has well understood links to databases such as Oracle oraperl