Eli Bendersky's website As I programmer my work tasks / hobbies are quite far from web programming. All of my programming work is done on standalone PC or embedded applications in C, C++ and Perl. I have some history of playing around with Perl CGI and I even built a couple of dynamic web-pages a few years ago, but the current plethora of technologies still overwhelms me.
Whenever you read about "web programming", concepts like PHP, XML, XSLT immediately arise. Although I know what each of them is (and with XML especially I have experience of C++ and Perl coding), until now I didn't have a good concept in my head of how all these connect and why they are needed in web programming.
So, I was happy to run upon an article (link old dead...) which provides a nice case-study of building a trivial dynamic webpage with PHP, XML and XSLT. I recommend it to everyone who feels as confused as I am.
Now, having finished the article I see that everything can be done with Perl/CGI.pm instead of PHP, using XML and XSLT in the same way. If I would venture on some web programming hack (as a learning experience, I have no plans of changing jobs) I'd surely use Perl. But there is a lot of hype and buzzwords in the Perl world as well recently, mostly connected to web programming - Template Toolkit, Mason, Catalyst. I think I should first learn about those a little :-)