Appendix 1

On Acquiring Perl from FTP Sites

 Perl is available for free from several sites. The best place to get started is by visiting the following two sites on the World Wide Web: http://www.perl.org and htpp://www.perl.com.

      http://www.perl.org is the site for The Perl Institute. It is a non-profit organization whose mission is to support the community of people who use Perl and facilitate the development of Perl as a programming language. It has links to CPAN sites. CPAN stands for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. The URL for CPAN is http://www.cpan.org. There are many sites around the world that store Perl core and many well-designed Perl modules that do almost anything anyone wants. Perl and its modules have been ported to many different machines. If you want to obtain Perl for Unix, Macintosh, DOS, and Windows machines, CPAN is one place where you obtain it. You can download Perl to your machine if you are connected on the Internet and have a
World Wide Web browser. Otherwise, you will have to obtain a Perl CD that comes with many books on Perl. Perl also comes as pre-loaded software on many Unix machines.  

   The Perl Institute site also links to the Perl FAQ, i.e., a list of questions that people frequently ask about Perl and the answers to those questions. There are many simple as well as tricky questions answered here.

The www.perl.com site is also a very useful site. Anything you want to find about Perl is available on this site or has a link from this site. It is also a CPAN site and has a search facility to find what you want.

If your machine is a Macintosh computer, the version of Perl to download depends on your operating system. For MacOS 9 or lower, there is a version called MacPerl. There are links to MacPerl from perl.org or perl.com. It is available directly from http://www.macperl.com. If the Macintosh operating system you are using is Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server, it has FreeBSD underneath the graphical user interface. Perl for Unix will build on such a platform.    

If you use a Windows machine, another place to obtain Perl from is http://www.activestate.com. The version of Perl available here is called ActivePerl and installs easily. ActivePerl is also available for several Unix platforms.

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