Most books make Perl unnecessarily hard to learn by attempting to teach the whole language, including its many redundancies, while ignoring the reader's knowledge of related languages and concepts. This book makes Perl easy to learn by teaching a strategically designed subset that's familiar to UNIX/Linux people, and by capitalizing on their existing knowledge rather than ignoring it. With this book, readers learn a carefully designed subset of the language called Minimal Perl, which was developed through five years of experience in training software professionals at major corporations. It makes Perl more accessible to those having UNIX/Linux skill levels ranging from elementary to expert, by capitalizing on their existing knowledge of important utilities (grep, awk), or essential concepts (filters, command substitution, looping). Dozens of detailed programming examples are shown, drawn from contemporary application areas such as system administration, networking, web development, databases, finance, HTML, CGI, and text analysis.