A dictionary style collection of technical words and terms with simple explanations.

Practical Extraction and Reporting Language is an open source server side programming language extensively used for web scripts and to process data passed via the Common Gateway Interface from HTML forms etc. Perl scripts are not embedded within HTML pages and do not download to the web browser but reside on the server. They execute by being triggered from commands within HTML pages or other scripts and may produce HTML output that does download to the web browser.

Some facts about Perl:

Perl is the most popular web programming language due to its text manipulation capabilities and rapid development cycle.
Perl is widely known as " the duct-tape of the Internet".
Perl can handle encrypted Web data, including e-commerce transactions.
Perl can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing by as much as 2000%.

For more information, please see the Official Perl website.