There’s an updated O’Reilly ebook for Learning Perl, 6e. If you’ve already purchased the ebook, the update should already be in your O’Reilly account. I’m not sure how that works because my account has special author magic associated with it. If you don’t have an O’Reilly account, you can register your books for free.
When you report problems with the book, we usually have comments back to the publisher with a day or so telling them what to do about it. The next time our book gets built (I don’t know the schedule), you get the benefit of the fixes. The corrections should also show up in Safari. If (when) there is another printing of the book, that printing is also updated.
DocBook is a pig part of this process, and it’s going to get even better. O’Reilly has invested quite a bit in DocBook and their internal process to make the books from that. The only thing that keeps them from generating books more often is just human time. Someone has to take the list of corrections and fix them in the sources. If it’s an O’Reilly person, they have to rely on our comments about what they should do. The DocBook sources are in source control, though, and I have access to those, which means I can actually close problems by just fixing them. It takes me as long to do that as it does to explain the fix to someone. When I want to kick off a new build, I just do that.