Perl was created by programmer Larry Wall. He wanted to have all the cool features
of other programming languages rolled into one,
and leave out all the useless functions. Perl stands for Practical Extraction and
Reporting Language. CGI, or the Common Gateway Interface, is the means by
which a Perl program, executed on the webserver, communicates with a client (i.e. a user with a web browser).

Learning how to program in Perl is an essential skill that anyone wishing
to create advanced, interactive web sites needs to know. On the web today, Perl powers
many web applications we all take for granted. Forms, search engines, guestbooks,
electronic greetings, counters, automatic page generation, mailing lists, and databases
are all made possible through Perl and CGI. When one has Perl and CGI at their fingertips,
the possibilities are truly endless.

Perl is an interpreted programming language, as opposed to a compiled programming language.
"Interpreted" means that a program written in Perl must be executed by the
Perl interpreter every time it is run. In contrast, a program written in a language such as C or C++
must be "compiled" once and then can be directly executed later.

Because Perl is an interpreted language, it is quite easy to write a program, run and test it,
modify it, run it again, and so on, because recompiling after each change isn't necessary.
However, this can be a limitation, because it requires that the Perl interpreter be present
every time the program is run. Most WWW servers have Perl installed, though, so using
Perl for CGI is usually possible.

Lesson 2 - Basic Structure of Perl