Additional information
by Jarkko Hietaniemi (Author), John MacDonald (Author), Jon Orwant (Author)
Many programmers would love to use Perl for projects that involve heavy lifting, but miss the many traditional algorithms that textbooks teach for other languages. Computer scientists have identified many techniques that a wide range of programs need, such as:
- Fuzzy pattern matching for text (identify misspellings!)
- Finding correlations in data
- Game-playing algorithms
- Predicting phenomena such as Web traffic
- Polynomial and spline fitting
Author Biography
Jarkko Hietaniemi is the creator and Master Librarian of CPAN: Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. He has also been known to frequent Perl developer forums. Luckily enough, getting his MSc in CS in the field of parallel computing didn't interfere overly much with his Perl and UNIX hacking. During those savored moments of off-line time, he fancies gobbling up speculative fiction and popular science. His real life employer is Nokia Research Center.
John Macdonald has been using Perl commercially since 1988 for a suite of Unix system administration tools. His background with Unix dates back to the days when Unix was written in PDP-11 assembler and later includes representing the University of Waterloo at the first UNIX Users Meeting at City University of New York in the mid-1970s while finishing his M. Math degree. (In those days before the creation of Usenix, the people at the meeting would sit together around a single table.) In addition, his background includes work on compilers, kernel internals, device drivers and the like. He has also been observed partaking in recreational computing activities.
Jon Orwant, a well-known member of the Perl community, founded The Perl Journal and co-authored OReillys bestseller, Programming Perl, 3rd Edition.
