Perl is a mature, extremely flexible, general-purpose programming language, which is especially well-suited to textual manipulation. Such Perl capabilities have been applied by a wide range of professionals in both systems support and programming fields for various applications. These include: manipulating text and data, database access, CGI programming, HTML generation, and parsing and generating XML files. Extensions to Perl provide GUI facilities and connections to a large variety of proprietary DBMSs; the course examines the GUI Perl/Tk package and illustrates the use of a variety of DBMSs and pseudo-DBMSs. This nominally 2-day course provides a comprehensive examination of some of the applications for which Perl is commonly employed. In many cases these applications are combined (eg database access via CGI and DBI) and the practical sessions emphasise this. The course also optionally provides a brief overview of other selected applications. Optionally additional sessions can be scheduled to provide the essential skills in non-Perl techniques that these applications may require, such as HTML and SQL coding.