Oh man, this brings back memories... when this article was written, I was a high school freshman, and I had just bought Teach Yourself Perl 5 in 21 Days so I could learn how to write my own custom CGI scripts for my geeky personal webpage. It was my first true programming language, after childhood flings with BASIC.

Also, I find it humorous how the term “hacker” is used here to refer to literally anyone who works on computers. I suppose the title of this site retains that meaning...