It takes a mere village to raise a puny human child, but it took a whole globe-girdling Perl cabal to get this book done! These are the readers who, as a personal favor to me, took the time to read and greatly improve my first sketchy manuscript, each in their own particular, helpful, and careful ways: Gisle Aas, David H. Adler, Tim Allwine, Elaine Ashton, Gene Boggs, Gavin Estey, Scott Francis, Joe Johnston, Kevin Healy, Conrad Heiney, David Huggins-Daines, Samy Kamkar, Joe Kline, Yossef Mendelssohn, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Brad Murray, David Ondrik, Clinton Pierce, Robert Spier, Andrew Stanley, Dennis Taylor, Martin Thurn, and Glenn Wood.
I'm also especially thankful to Elaine Ashton for doing a last-minute review not just of this manuscript's prose, but of all the code blocks. If not for her eagle eye, you'd be scratching your head over variables and subroutines magically renaming themselves all over the place!
I am grateful to Conrad Heiney for suggesting the California Department of Motor Vehicles as an example for Chapter 5, "Forms". Thanks also to Mark-Jason Dominus for suggesting the ABEBooks web site as an example in that same chapter. Many thanks to Gisle Aas, Michael A. Chase, and Martijn Koster for making LWP such a reliable and indispensable addition to every programmer's toolkit.
And last but not least, thanks to the people at O'Reilly who intrepidly pushed for this book to get done when I really just wanted to stay in bed and play Tetris. The chief author-wrangler is my editor, Nat Torkington, but I'm much obliged also to the many other under-appreciated O'Reilly people who conspired to get this book from my hands to yours: Jon Orwant (of Perl Journal fame even before he got to O'Reilly), Neil Walls (who slaved over Appendix F, "ASCII Table" so you can see what a ⊥ looks like!), sage editor Linda Mui, Betsy Waliszewski in marketing, and in the production department, Linley Dolby, the book's production editor and copyeditor and Rob Romano, the book's illustrator.