I had heard that Perl was an excellent scripting language with powerful string handling, regular expression, and process control features. I learned Perl, and learned to like it, when I was thrown into a project in which most of my work involved slinging around text files. I quickly found myself spending hours writing Perl programs that would have taken me days or weeks to write in a different language.

This book uses the Perl programming language to illustrate how to design and implement practical network applications. Perl is an ideal language for network programming for a number of reasons. First, like the rest of the language, Perl's networking facilities were designed to make the easy things easy. It takes just two lines of code to open a network connection to a server somewhere on the Internet and send it a message. A fully capable Web server can be written in a few dozen lines of code.

Perl is a versatile, powerful programming language used in a variety of disciplines, ranging from system administration to web programming to database manipulation. One slogan of Perl is that it makes easy things easy and hard things possible. Interm...