Poe Curtis - Perl Hacks: Tips & Tools for Programming, Debugging, and Surviving

chromatic works for O'Reilly Media, where he edits the free and open source web sites of the O'Reilly Network. In his spare time, he writes books such as this one. In the remaining minutes, he contributes to the CPAN, Perl 5, Perl 6, Parrot, and even Pugs. He lives just west of Portland, Oregon by a park and a creek and would like to finish more projects someday, including writing a novel, a comic book, a television show, and sleeping. Catch up on his hobbies at http://wgz.org/chromatic.

Dr. Damian Conway is a professional Perl boffin. As the author of numerous popular CPAN modules (

Earlier this century, displaying his usual stellar sense of timing, Curtis "Ovid" Poe switched from mainframes to web programming in Perl and promptly watched the dot-com industry implode. Despite this minor setback and working for several currently non-existent companies, Ovid stuck with Perl and actually discovered he liked it. A frequent speaker at user groups and author of numerous CPAN modules and a popular Perl CGI course, Ovid is a Perl Foundation Steering Committee member and also heads the TPF grant committee.

Perl is also a language with a rich and varied community of experts, wizards, gurus, goofs, and ne'er-do-wells. A few of the most colorful characters[] contributed to this book.

Adrian Howard still hopes that Lisp and Smalltalk will take over the world, but in the meantime gets paid for playing with Perl and Ruby amongst other things. Agile fanatic. Testing bigot. Usability zealot. Recently guilt tripped into being a Perl Grant Manager by Ovid. Saving up for a small castle to share with his beloved Kathryn and a small band of loyal Yorkshire Terriers.

Chris Dolan is a software developer living in Madison, Wisconsin. With a Ph.D. in Astronomy, he has a very strong math and science background. He started programming professionally as a teenager in the late 1980s. During his free time, he is an active participant in several online software development communities and is an avid bicyclist.

David Landgren started using Perl 4.019 when awk was no longer sufficient to cope with the things he was trying to do. In 1999 he founded the Paris Perl Mongers and helped organize the YAPC::Europe 2003 conference. He currently works at a large French human resources firm, where he likes to go by the title of IT Operations Manager, using Perl everywhere. He spends what little spare time he has left writing summaries for the perl5-porters mailing list. Contact him at

David Wheeler, a longtime Perl hacker, made a name for himself as the lead developer of the Bricolage content management system, and as President and founder of Kineticode (

Guillaume Cottenceau is a software developer. He's been interested in computers for too long to remember, enjoys programming with various tools and languages, and found himself lucky enough to be the catalyst for a game written in Perl called "Frozen-Bubble" which is regularly cited as the favorite game of the Linux community.

H. Merijn Brand is a Perl 5 porter, the Configure pumpking, and an Amsterdam Perl Monger. He was born on December 30, 1961, is married, and has two kids. He has worked as a data analyst for PROCURA B.V. in The Netherlands since June 1991. Visit his home page at

Jesse Vincent doesn't drink that often, but does find that a drink or two tends to improve the CPAN remarkably.

Joe McMahon is a test automation architect at Yahoo! whose background includes extensive development experience: 25 years of work at NASA, with everything from spacecraft ground communications systems to Web development. He has contributed to core Perl test support, supplied the debuggers internal documentation, and supports several CPAN modules, from App::SimpleScan and WWW::Mechanize::Pluggable to Date::PeriodParser and GraphViz::Data::Structure.

Joshua ben Jore came to Perl because he had to write a CGI app for a political campaign and he'd heard that Perl was best for that sort of thing. He stayed when he found out for himself how wonderful CPAN was. His latest projects have been working toward getting Lispy macros and lazy evaluation in Perl and learning what Prolog has to offer. He is well-known at perlmonks.org under the handle diotalevi and admits to being a Morris dancer.

Michael Graham is a Perl programmer who lives in Toronto where he writes web applications with CGI::Application and its rich suite of plug-ins. He works at Wilder & Associates (

Philippe "BooK" Bruhat, author of HTTP::Proxy and Net::Proxy, lives in Lyon, France with his wife and cat and is an active member of the French and European Perl communities. He worked on the translations of Programming Perl , 3rd Edition and Perl Best Practices for O'Reilly France, and publishes Perl articles in GNU/Linux Magazine France . As the co-developper of Act (A Conference Toolkit) and a member of the YAPC Europe Foundation, he helps organize European Perl workshops and conferences, at which he is also a regular speaker. He would love it if you tried his Acme::MetaSyntactic module (updated weekly).

Ricardo Signes trained for a career in philosophy, but the sudden onset of the Industrial Revolution forced him to work with baser forms of logic. He lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and writes Perl for Pobox.com.

Sean M. Burke is a perfectly normal human being, based on organic molecules, and exhibiting bilateral symmetry. He is typical. He has written two O'Reilly books, Perl and LWP and RTF Pocket Guide , has contributed dozens of modules to CPAN, and was a regular columnist for The Perl Journal for about five years. (His articles appear in the various O'Reilly Best of the Perl Journal books, notably the Games, Diversions & Perl Culture volume.) Trained as a linguist, he now lives on an island in southeast Alaska, where he develops tools for Native language preservation. Wild rumors place his web site at

Simon Wistow currently herds London.pmthe largest and most rowdy of all the Perl Monger groups. In his spare time he writes rather too many CPAN modules of dubious usefulness.

Stephen B. Jenkins (a.k.a. Erudil) is the senior programmer/analyst at the Aerodynamics Laboratory of the Institute for Aerospace Research, National Research Council of Canada. He has written for