Lets say that you, like me, are addicted to World of Warcraft, and you decide that you'd like to track the progress of your characters, or maybe your friends characters, on your personal website. You could hard code all that data, updating whenever you have the time, or with some simple Perl scripting magic, you could automate the whole process! Learn more in this module profile for Games::WoW::Armory...

How to read character information from the World of Warcraft servers

'Pragmatic' can often mean 'boring' but this in-depth look at building a web crawler in Perl is not boring at all. In fact, it's informative and a great example of a truely useful Perl application. Check out this fantastic tutorial!

A pragmatic approach to writing a mp3 crawler in perl

Here is some sound advice on Perl administration techniques that's worth a read. Pretty standard stuff, but if you're a programmer that's been double tasked with maintaining the systems you work on, this will be helpful. Even if you're not a system administrator, I highly recommend that you learn to compile Perl yourself on your own systems. It's a good learning experience if nothing else.

Perl Best Admin Practices

A conditional is a control structure that will activate specific blocks of your code based upon whether your specified statement (or expression, or condition) evaluates to true or false. You can use these conditional statements to make logical decisions, or take specific actions based on available data. Learn more in this tutorial on using unless...

Conditionals - How to make decisions in Perl using unless

This is an interesting read that not only has some excellent Perl programming examples, but also shows off how to interface with Google Earth. This set of programs shows how to jump in and parse email headers on your (in this case, gmail) email account, taking the time sent data and creating an 'availability map' so you can see who is generally available and when using Google Earth. Of course, like all reports, the more data you have to work with the more accurate a picture this will paint.

Create time-availability maps with Perl and Google Earth

A conditional is a control structure that will activate specific blocks of your code based upon whether your specified statement (or expression, or condition) evaluates to true or false. You can use these conditional statements to make logical decisions, or take specific actions based on available data. Learn more in this tutorial on using if, else, and elsif...

Conditionals - How to make decisions in Perl using if, else, and elsif

As demonstrated by this blogger, there are known performance bugs when using the Red Hat builds of Perl and the bless/overload combo. Definitely something that you should avoid if you're using the combo of Perl and Red Hat in a production setting. Apparently there's a patch in the pipeline that has yet to get into the Red Hat packages yet, and you can compile Perl yourself and bypass the problem all together.

Red Hat Perl performance problems

Why do people keep using Perl when there are seemingly other 'up-and-coming' languages out there? Ask this blogger, and he'll tell you the same thing a lot of us have been saying over and over again. You just can't beat CPAN! All in all, this author has some nice reasons, and some good posts on Catalyst as well.

Why I stick with Perl

This is a highly detailed and excellent look at basic perl sorting. I highly recommend you scan this article either for a refresher, or if you've never tried to understand how sorting data actually works in perl.

Perl Sorting Techniques

Lets say you're building a perl script to traverse a file system and record what it finds. As you open file handles, you need to know if you're dealing with an actual file or with a directory since you'll treat them differently...

How to tell if something is a file or a directory in Perl