Subtitles of the Movie

You don't need a lot of complicated software to start getting productive with perl. And you don't need to spend a lot of money either. You don't need to spend any money if you don't want to. In this movie we are going to looking at the basic tools that you need to get started with perl, and also some useful resources that you might find handy along the way. To begin with, let's look at the basic tool set that you will need in order to start scripting with perl. The most vital part of this is of course the perl executable itself. This is a program that interprets perl scripts and allows us to run our perl code. Since perl is an open source technology, the source code is available in a wide variety of places, but the best place to get it is at cpan.org, and as well as the source code from which you can compile your own binary version, if you feel adventurous enough, you can also get hold of a large number of precompiled binaries for whatever system you happen to be running. If you are using a version of Unix, any of the Unix based operating systems, then very likely you already have perl installed. The same is true for the Macintosh operating system version 10 or higher. If you are running Windows then a very good place to get hold of a good Windows binary version of perl, is at activestate.com. Next in your tool set is a web browser; you must likely have one of these already. and it really does matter which web browser you use. Some options in this regard are Mozilla (which is an open source browser), Microsoft's Internet Explorer (again available for free on a loan or open source). If you are running Windows you probably have Internet Explorer installed already, and you can pickup a latest version at Microsoft.com. Opera is a very fast and standard spaced web browser and it's not a free product, but there is an evaluation version, which you can use and download from opera.com. If you prefer you can also use Netscape Navigator. A vitally important part of your tool set if you are planning to use perl for the web, is a web server. Now you could put the perl binary and your web server and run that all on a remote server. Or you might prefer to install everything on your machine on your desktop. Whichever way you do, the machine that is running perl, if you are using it for the web, will have to be running some kind of web server software. The most popular web server software in the world is the Apache HTTPd. And that's available from apache.org. Once again open source and completely free. If you are running windows you might want to consider Microsoft's IIS; I should point out however that apache is available both the windows and Unix operating systems and also for the Mac as of OS10. Xitami is another open source web server software, very small footprint, very fast, and there is also a raft of other commercial products such as Zeus, which I believe is one of the fastest web servers in the world.