Perl and XML
XML is a text-based markup language that has taken the programming World by storm. More
powerful than HTML yet less demanding than SGML, XML has proven itself to be flexible and
resilient. XML is the perfect tool for formatting documents with even the smallest bit of
complexity, from Web pages to legal contracts to books. However, XML has also proven itself to
be indispensable for organizing and conveying other sorts of data as well, thus its central role
in web services like SOAP and XML-RPC.
As the Perl programming language was tailor-
Linux was first released into an unsuspecting World in the summer of 1991. Initially
the spare-time hobby of a Finnish computer scientist by the name of Linus Torvalds,
Linux was at first accessible only in software source code form to those with enough
expertise to build and install it. Early enthusiasts (most also developers themselves by
necessity) exploited the growth of the Internet in the early 1990s as a means to build
online communities and drive development forward. These communities helped to
build the first Linux software distributions, containing all the software components
needed to install and use a Linux system without requiring users to be technical experts.
