Overview

Yes, Python is yet another scripting language. Perl may be the most popular language on the Web, but you may well want to know about Python.

Scripting languages, you'll recall, have some features that make them important to system administrators and programmers alike. They're interpreted rather than compiled, which means that you can usually develop in them faster than with the edit/compile/run cycle required by compiled languages. (The tradeoff is that the applications generally run more slowly than the equivalent application coded in a compiled language. Sometimes this doesn't matter do you care if a file scan that runs once a month takes 10 minutes or 20? and sometimes it does, in which case you can declare the scripting-language version a prototype and recode the application in C now that you know for sure what it's supposed to do.) A good scripting language can function as glue, sticking together otherwise incompatible applications or libraries and making them work together.

Most scripting languages got started before the Web did, but when that came along they turned out to be good fits for CGI programming, whether you're Web-enabling existing applications or putting together new ones. In the rush to be the first to new Internet territory, the fact that you could get your site up faster using scripted CGIs rather than compiled ones made scripting languages more popular than ever.

Perl is probably the best known of these languages, but many script languages are used for CGI programming, including DCL, various UNIX shell...