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1.2. How Perl Can Help

System administration work should use any and every computer language available when appropriate. So why single out Perl for a book?

The answer to this question harkens back the to the very nature of system administration. Rémy Evard, a colleague and friend, once described the job of a system administrator like this: "On one side, you have a set of resources: computers, networks, software, etc. On the other side, you have a set of users with needs and projects--people who want to get work done. Our job is to bring these two sets together in the most optimal way possible, translating between the world of vague human needs and the technical world when necessary."

System administration is often a glue job; Perl is one of the best glue languages. Perl was being used for system administration work well before the World Wide Web came along with its voracious need for glue mechanisms.

Perl has several other things going for it from a system administration perspective:

In the interest of full disclosure, it is important to note that Perl is not the answer to all of the world's problems. Sometimes it is not even the appropriate tool for system administration programming because:

The moral here is choose the appropriate tool. More often than not, Perl has been that tool for me, and hence this book.



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