I’ve added a new appendix to Learning Perl to handle all of the Unicode stuff I was having difficultly integrating into the other chapters.
Our goal has always been to present just the information you need without getting into distracting details. The problem with Unicode is that there are a lot of distracting details. Not only that, you have to learn some things in tandem. We can’t talk about Unicode strings without introducing strings, but at the same time, we want to start with Unicode as the basis for strings.
I wanted to have a lot of that stuff in the Strings chapter, but a lot of the Perl Unicode stuff lives in modules. We do talk about modules later in the book, but I want to use some of them earlier.
Any beginning book is going to have this problem. You need to ignore some stuff to at least get started. As such, I gave up on trying to cram all the Unicode stuff into the chapters and put most of it into a new appendix. This also means that if people want to ignore some of the Unicode stuff, which I don’t recommend, they can. But, they shouldn’t. So, read the whole book, even the appendices!