This Book's Audience Network Programming with Perl is written for novice and intermediate Perl programmers. I assume you know the basics of Perl programming, including how to write loops , how to construct if-else statements, how to write regular expression pattern matches, the concept of the automatic $_ variable, and the basics of arrays and hashes. You should have access to a Perl interpreter and some experience writing, running, and debugging scripts. Just as important, you should have access to a computer that is connected both to a local area network and to the Internet! Although the recipes in Chapter 10 on setting Perl-based network servers to start automatically when a machine is booted do require superuser (administrative) access, none of the other examples require privileged access to a machine. This book does take advantage of the object-oriented features in Perl version 5 and higher, but most chapters do not assume a deep knowledge of this system. Chapter 1 addresses all the details you will need as a casual user of Perl objects. This book is not a thorough review of the TCP/IP protocol at the lowest level, or a guide to installing and configuring network hubs, routers, and name servers. Many good books on the mechanics of the TCP/IP protocol and network administration are listed in Appendix D. | 
