Automating Windows with Perl

Who This Book Is For
• Do you have to administer a network with Windows machines on it? Is it your job to
make a network run reliably? Are you frustrated by the lack of tools to automate
system administration tasks in Windows? This book shows you ways to make your
network run automatically.
• Are you a power user who wants your PC to do more tedious work automatically so
you can concentrate on the important stuff? This book shows you how a few Perl
scripts can save hours of your time.
• Is system and network administration your second job? Small Windows workgroups
often don’t have dedicated, full-time administrators, and you might have been given
the administration job in addition to your regular duties. This book shows you ways
to reduce the time you spend administering Windows.
• Do you want to make life easier for end users? Maybe you don’t have time to
handhold end users and want to create automatic processes to • make their
computing easier by creating solutions that let them get their work done. This book
shows you ways to create automated solutions.
• Have you had trouble finding information on Perl in Windows? This books contains
many practical, hands-on projects showing Perl at its best in the Windows
environment.
• Are you a hacker who wants a new frontier of almost unlimited potential? Perl can
do many amazing things. This book may be the inspiration you need to get started.
This book is for all the real programmers and hackers out there. I wrote the book I
wanted to read: a book that is immediately useful and practical, but that also has the
background information, extra explanations, tidbits of history, and side trips to
interesting places. It’s not just another how-to book, but one I hope you can return to
again and again.

What This Book Is Not
• A basic Perl tutorial. I assume that you know, or are willing to make a motivated
effort to learn, the Perl basics. If you need help deciding where to go, the
bibliography points you to many excellent sources. For this book, I assume you
know Perl well enough to start writing useful programs. I do give significant tutorial
information on new topics covered in this book, such as Automation, but I do not
discuss Perl basics.
• A treatment of advanced, idiomatic, tricky, or clever Perl. My programs are the meat
and potatoes of Perl programming. They are unspectacular, straightforward, and
easy to follow. Plenty of resources exist for the clever stuff. Perl is a language that
allows creativity of expression, but it is also a language that admits boring
practicality. This book concentrates on the practical aspects.
• A Windows programming tutorial. I assume you either already know or are
motivated to learn topics like Automation. Again, the bibliography points you to
many excellent sources.
• A regular-expression tutorial. I only use regular expressions when I need to and do
not pay much attention to them other than how they apply to the programs. If you
are a Windows programmer who has never encountered regular expressions, I
suggest a gentle introduction like Learning Perl on Win32 Systems.
• A Windows NT domain administration guide. If you are looking for module-bymodule,
function-by-function descriptions of everything you can do to administer a
Windows NT domain using Perl (users, groups, drive sharing, security, etc.), this is
not the book. I discuss a much higher level of system administration in this book.
• A place to find a discussion of PC serial-port programming in Perl. One amazingly
frequent question on the Perl newsgroup is how to use the PC’s COM port in Perl. I
have no idea how to do it myself since I do not do that kind of prgramming, and Perl
does not seem to be the best language for it.

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