Perl or Practical Extraction and Report Language is a wonderful hacker's language-it allows users to solve complex computer problems more rapidly than with C and more straightforwardly than with shell scripts. For this reason, Perl is very popular in the UNIX system administrator community. However, Perl is much more than a systems management tool for the parsing of text files. With the arrival of version 5, Perl has become a much more usable and powerful programming language. Perl5 now supports enhanced regular expressions, complex data structures, embedded C/C++ functions, and modular and object-oriented programming. These features and Perl's availability for nearly every UNIX-type system, as well as AmigaOS, MacOS, OS/2, VMS, Windows95 and Windows NT, have made Perl a popular Web application development tool. In addition, numerous modules and libraries have been developed to help programmers create Web applications more rapidly and cleanly. Perl is not only useful for World Wide Web development, modules for interfacing Perl with Oracle and other database engines are also available. When these modules are combined, developers have an extensive toolkit for constructing Oracle-to-World Wide Web applications.