What kind of problems was Perl built to solve? Perl, just like awk, continues to thrive because it solves a particular class of problems exceptionally well. Find out from this week’s book review.

One of the greatest changes that happens when someone becomes a textsmith is not learning a new command. It is learning a new way of thinking. This second of the three-part series on working with streams delves into the psychology of a textsmith.

This post is the first of the three-part series on stream editing: but what does it mean to work with streams? This is where understanding its key editor comes into play.

One of the habits that gradually changes a person’s shell scripting style is discovering that Bash can manipulate text on its own.

Perl is in an interesting position today. It is no longer the language that every system administrator or text-processing enthusiast is expected to know, yet many of the ideas we take for granted today—powerful regular expressions, concise text transformations, one-liners, and “glue” programming—owe a great deal to Perl. Rather than asking whether it is obsolete, perhaps the better question is: what role does Perl play in the modern textsmith’s toolbox?