Written for those with some prior knowledge of Perl, Scott McMahan's Automating Windows with Perl brings the spirit of Perl to Windows along with some examples of useful scripts that can simplify the life of any administrator or advanced programmer. Rather than a tutorial on the basics of Perl, this book concentrates on explaining the philosophy of Perl on Unix and what's good for the Windows platform. For administrators, this book shows how to automate backups of the directory into the night. ZIP file. For programmers, it shows that the traditional advantage of Perl to manage build good translated to Win32, where it can be used to automate almost programming compilation. Instead, it provides a nice selection of sample scripts, as well as a guide to understanding the spirit of Perl and the real benefits it offers to be a Windows administrator or developer -. Richard Dragan Topics covered: history and overview of Perl, a Win32 Perl cron utility, using SMTP e-mail with Win32 Perl, automatic backups, Microsoft Office 97 automation, integrate executables project: "smoke test," automate rebuilding, C + + add- ins for Perl with Visual C + +, CGI scripts, and Perl instructions and tips.