"Perl is a programming language of growing significance in the world of software development. A Little Book on Perl meets that growing academic market need for Perl books. This book attempts to target experienced programmers, whether that experience has come from professional programming or from the first two courses in a degree program in computer science. Neither a comprehensive reference book nor a tutorial, this book lands somewhere in the middle of these two models. The reader's advantage is a new model-no need to have prior knowledge of awk or C, or even anything about UNIX-since the contents of the book do not depend on any particular computer platform."--Jacket.