1.2. Platform and version details

This module is taught using Unix or a Unix-like operating system. Most of what is learnt will work equally well on Windows NT or other operating systems; your instructor will inform you throughout the course of any areas which differ.

All Netizen's Perl training courses use Perl 5, the most recent major release of the Perl language. Perl 5 differs signficantly from previous versions of Perl, so you will need a Perl 5 interpreter to use what you have learnt. However, older Perl programs should work fine under Perl 5.

The web server used for examples in this module is Apache, available from http://www.apache.org/. We have chosen this web server for examples as it is freely available, widely used, and very fast and full-featured.

The database server used during this module is MySQL, available from \url{http://www.mysql.com/}. We have chosen it because it is free for most purposes, runs on many platforms, is the most common database used by ISPs offering database services to web hosting clients, and has a good feature set for our purposes. However, all the Perl code examples given in this module will work equally well with any of a number of database systems, including PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, and Informix.