Perl
"To those who merely like it, Perl is the 'Practical Extraction and Report Language'. To those who love it, Perl is the 'Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister'. And to the minimalists in the crowd, Perl seems like a pointless exercise in redundancy. But that's okay." - From the preface of 'Programming Perl'
TIMTOWTDI
'There Is More Than One Way To Do It', is the motto of Perl.
That makes it comparable to human languages.
Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible.
Perl according to Larry Wall
"Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).
Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it."
Larry Wall is the original creator of Perl and one of the associates of O'Reilly & Associates.
The Camel Book
'Programming Perl' is the bible of Perl. It is published by O'Reilly & Associates who has a wide range of Perl books.
At the moment (January 2004) the latest Camel Book is the third edition. It is written by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen and Jon Orwant and covers version 5.6 of Perl.
The camel on the frontpage of 'Programming Perl' is from the book 'Animals' (ISBN: 0486237664) published by Dover Publications.
Links
CPAN - Comprehensive Perl Archive Network
Diligence, Patience, and Humility, by Larry Wall
Oneliners
Perl.com
Timeline
YAPC - Yet Another Perl Conference