Practical Perl Tools: I Just Called to Say $_

If you’ve noticed a spate of “here’s how to use Perl to talk to X Web service” topics in this column lately, it probably isn’t a coincidence. I have to confess, I’m a sucker for a Web service that gives you super powers just by using the simple API they provide. For example, in our last column we looked at how to easily translate text in and out of a large number of the world’s major languages using Google Translate’s API. For this column, we’re going to do all sorts of fun things with phones from Perl. If you’ve ever wanted a way to send and receive SMS and voice messages, retrieve input from a caller, and stuff like that, have I got a column for you.