Perl was published by Larry Wall in 1987; Perl 5 appeared in 1994 and has been remarkably stable since then -- I have code from 1998 that still works great. It feels like a more powerful sed or awk, and has an enormous available online library at cpan.org. There are many books describing it; start with "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall; get advice on elegance from "Modern Perl" by Chromatic; if you want to build an Internet component smaller than an available module (or get guidance on the implementation thereof), "Network Programming with Perl" by Lincoln Stein is superb.