One of the wonderful features of GIMP is that it all its functionality may be accessed through scripting. So far most of the script programming for Gimp has been done through Scheme through Script-Fu. Unfortunately the Scheme environment Gimp provides is very primitive, e.g. without any reasonable error handling. Furthermore, must users are not familiar with scheme as a language. Some users may therefore prefer to write scripts for the Gimp in Perl.
Perl as a language is probably more familiar to the web-literate users, as it is the major language for writing CGI scripts. Now, Gimp scripts may also be written with Perl. This tutorial will describe how to write such plug-ins and scripts for Gimp. The yellowpages contains links to a variety of resources. Try also to find interesting books about GIMP and PERL.