To use this book effectively, you need to be familiar with the day-to-day details of running a web server, and you need to know the Perl programming language. We expect that you have already programmed in the Perl programming language. Having written simple CGI scripts and having experience with setting up the Apache web server are definite pluses. Knowing your way around the operating system is another plus, but not a requirement.

Most examples in the book were done on the Linux operating system, but the examples and discussions should apply equally well to other operating systems, especially other Unix flavors. There is a dedicated section on installing mod_perl on Windows machines in Chapter 2.