Chapter 12. Perl API

The easiest method of connecting to MySQL with the programming language Perl is to use the Perl DBI module, which is part of the core Perl installation. You can download both Perl and the DBI module from CPAN (http://www.cpan.org). This chapter was written with the assumption that the reader has Perl installed along with DBI.pm and that the reader has a basic knowledge of Perl. Its focus, therefore, is on how to connect to MySQL, how to run SQL statements, and how to effectively retrieve data from MySQL using Perl and DBI. For the examples here, the scenario of a bookstore's inventory is used.