Contributors

The following people contributed their hacks, writing, and inspiration to this book:

• Jacek Artymiak (http://www.artymiak.com) is a freelance consultant, developer and writer. He's been programming computers since 1986, starting with Sinclair ZX Spectrum. His interests include network security, computer graphics and animation, and multimedia. Jacek lives in Lublin, Poland, with his wife Gosia and can be reached at [e-mail].

• Chris Ball (http://printf.net) holds a BSc in Computation from UMIST, England, and works on machine learning problems as a researcher in Cambridge University's Inference Group. In his spare time, he can be found not answering email and hanging rooks at chess tournaments. You can email him at [e-mail].

• Paul Bausch (http://www. onfocus .com) is a web application developer and the cocreator of Blogger (http://www.blogger.com), the popular weblog software. His favorite site to spider is Amazon.com, the subject of his book Amazon Hacks (O'Reilly). He's also the coauthor of We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs (John Wiley & Sons), and he posts thoughts and photos almost daily to his personal weblog: onfocus.

• Erik Benson (http://www.erikbenson.com) is the Technical Program Manager of Personalized Merchandizing at Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com). He runs All Consuming (http://www.allconsuming.net) and has a weblog at http://www.erikbenson.com.

• Adam Bregenzer is a programmer in Atlanta, GA. He has been programming for most of his life and is an advocate of Unix-like operating systems. In his free time, he plots to take over the world . . . and eat Mexican food.

• Daniel Biddle spends far too much time reading abstruse technical documents and solving people's programming problems on IRC at irc.freenode.net, where he goes by the nickname deltab . He can be contacted at [e-mail].

• Sean M. Burke is the author of O'Reilly's Perl & LWP , RTF Pocket Guide , and many of the articles in the Best of the Perl Journal volumes . An active member in the Perl open source community, he is one of CPAN's most prolific module authors and an authority on markup languages. Trained as a linguist, he also develops tools for software internationalization and Native language preservation. He lives in Juneau, Alaska, with his feline overlord, Fang Dynasty.

• Simon Cozens (http://simon-cozens.org/) is a Perl programmer and author. He works as a research programmer for Kasei, and has released more than 50 Perl modules. His books include Beginning Perl , Extending and Embedding Perl , and the forthcoming second edition of Advanced Perl Programming . He also maintains the Perl.com (http://www.perl.com/) site for O'Reilly. When not stuck in front of a computer, he enjoys making music, playing the Japanese game of Go, and teaching at his local church .

• Rael Dornfest (http://www.raelity.org) assesses, experiments, programs, writes , and edits for O'Reilly & Associates. He has edited, coauthored, and contributed to various O'Reilly books. He is program chair for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. In his copious free time, Rael develops bits and bobs of freeware, including the Blosxom (http://www. blosxom .com) weblog application, and maintains his raelity bytes weblog.

• William Eastler is a freelance web developer and lover of all things Perl. He owns MonkeyMind (http://www.monkeymind.net), a decentralized web development company, and he is currently fighting through a mechanical engineering degree after a long absence from school. In his spare time, he enjoys ice dancing , reading, thinking up new inventions , and making offerings of Perl code to the unholy lord Morbus Iff.

• Scott Fallin is a freelance programmer and systems administrator. He is an avid, amateur Artificial Intelligence enthusiast who has thus far failed to achieve the grail of a sentient laptop. Scott believes in nothing if not tomorrow and a tight while loop.

• Ben Hammersley (http://www.benhammersley.com) is a writer, journalist , and gentleman adventurer of the most English sort . Living in Florence, Italy, with three hunting dogs and a novelist wife, Ben is failing to develop an opium habit. Nevertheless, his addled rants can be read at http://www.benhammersley.com. Or, abandon yourself to his email whims by writing to [e-mail].

• David Landgren grew up in Australia and moved to France in 1990. He started using Perl 4.019 when awk was no longer sufficient to cope with the things he was trying to accomplish. Since then, he has used, or uses, Perl to do many things, including server and database management, security auditing, document conversion, text processing, typography, reporting, IRC bots, web sites, and more. In 1999, he founded the Paris Perl Mongers, and in 2003 he helped organize the YAPC::Europe conference in Paris. He currently works at a large French human resources firm, where he likes to go by the title of IT Operations Manager. He can be contacted at [e-mail].

• Andy Lester (http://petdance.com) has been a professional programmer for 17 years and a Perl evangelist for a decade . He's the lead developer for WWW::Mechanize [Hack #21] and author or maintainer of a dozen other CPAN modules. His latest undertaking is the Phalanx project (http://qa.perl.org), devoted to improving the test suites of Perl and CPAN as a stepping stone to Perl 6. By day, he manages programmers for Follett Library Resources (http://www.titlewave.com) in McHenry, Illinois, where he lives with his wife Amy and 2-year-old daughter Quinn.

• James Linden (http://www.kodekrash.com) has more than 10 years of programming experience, spanning several mainstream languages. He is the chief technology officer of Ticluse Teknologi, a development firm specializing in library and government solutions, as well as the information systems consultant for CMM Concepts, a marketing agency specializing in telecommunications. An aficionado of information-sharing systems, James volunteers quite a bit of time to projects designed to disseminate ebooks and other materials that are part of the public domain.

• Niall Kennedy (http://niallkennedy.com) is a Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform living and working in San Francisco, California. He has employed spiders since 1995 to gather, relate, and verify large data sets for statistical analysis. He is on a constant search for algorithmic solutions to mundane problems that will help liberate today's information workers. Niall is currently employed at Callan Associates (http://www.callan.com) and has helped build both PriceGrabber.com (http://www.pricegrabber.com) and the American Express Small Business Network (http://open.americanexpress.com).

• l.m.orchard (http://www.decafbad.com) wants to be a computer scientist when he grows up, having decided so in second grade before it was cool. His sporadic ramblings and occasionally working code can be found at his 0xDECAFBAD wiki/weblog. Offers for free coffee (fully caffeinated or better, please ) can be sent to [e-mail]. l.m.orchard lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with two spotted cats and a very cute, very patient girl.

• Sean B. Palmer (http://infomesh.net/sbp/) is an interdisciplinary holisticist with a predilection for phenomic words. His homepage has the URI http://infomesh.net/sbp/ most of the time, and his customary Internet dwelling is irc://irc.freenode.net/sbp. Shantung wine can't get him drunk. He wonders if he's the first author ever to use the words ullage , twyndyllyngs , and wef in an autobiography. Since he wasn't allowed to read the other biographies in this book before publication, he couldn't make any funny jokes about the people, which is what he normally does in these things. Pseudorandom quote: " e snawe snitered ful snart, at snayped e wylde"Sir Gawain, author or authoress unknown. He feels love in nature, harmony in prose . I'd like to slip out of third person and thank Melissa, Aaron, Morb, Stuart, and my family. Thanks!

• Ron Pacheco is a software engineer and educator who lives in New England with his wife and two boys. His career has been a combination of university teaching, corporate employment, and private consulting. His favorite binary is /usr/bin/perl ; a Perl programmer for over 10 years, he uses it almost daily because it gets stuff done ! Ron can be contacted via email at [e-mail].

• Dean Peters is a graying code- monkey who by day is a mild-mannered IIS/.NET programmer, but by night becomes a not-so-evil Linux genius as he develops software and articles for his blogs , http://HealYourChurchWebSite.com and http://blogs4God.com.

• Richard Rose began life at an early age and rapidly started absorbing information, finding that he liked the taste of information relating to computers the best. He has since feasted upon information from the University of Bristol, England, where he earned a BSc with Honors. He lives in Bristol but currently does not work, and he will be returned for store credit as soon as somebody can find the receipt. Richard writes programs for the intellectual challenge. He also turns his hand to system administration and has done the obligatory time in tech support. For fun, he juggles, does close-up magic, and plays the guitar badly . He can also be found on IRC, where he currently is a network operator known as rik on the Open and Free Technology Community (irc.oftc.net).

• Mads Toftum is a longtime Perl hacker and Apache abuser who has been working in the ISP business since 1995. He spends way too much of his spare time playing with Unix, Apache, OpenSSL, and other security- related tools. At times, he can be found in the kitchen inventing new dishes or trying out new ideas from his ever-growing collection of cookbooks. He can be reached at [e-mail].

• Iain Truskett (http://iain.truskett.id.au) created and maintains the Perl Books site (http://books.perl.org) and a dozen modules on CPAN, including WWW::Yahoo::Groups [Hack #44].

• Eric Vitiello is the owner of Perceive Designs (http://www.perceive.net), a web design and programming firm located in Louisville, Kentucky. He likes to write database-driven code in a variety of languages, entertain his children, and make wine from various fruits. Sometimes, he even gets to leave his house. You can contact him at [e-mail].

Acknowledgments

Attempting to write a 300+ page book in two months (and failing) is a monumental effort, and if it weren't for a number of spirits (of both the physical and imbibed), we'd be much worse off.

Kevin

Thanks to all the impatient emails encouraging me to finish the book so I could work on AmphetaDesk, to Rich and Ken for being my scapegoats ("well, hey, at least I'm not that late"), and to all the folks on IRC who swore not to tell Rael I was goofing off . . . you're not half as worthless as I made you out to be. To Bruce, for making it easier to serve in heav'n than reign in hell, and to Neil for the days of enjoyment with The Sandman , along with a reiteration I knowingly reverse.

Tara

Kevin's been an excellent coauthor to work with on this book. Thanks, Kev. My family has been their usual incredibly patient selves as I worked on this book. Thanks, family. A lot of this book has been the work of some great contributors. They had good ideas, they had fun applications, and they had amusing comments in their code. A big thanks to all of them who took the time and effort to help us.

And thank you for reading.