Category: administrative note

Learning Perl Turn-in day

I have to turn in Learning Perl, 6th Edition today so it can enter “production”. This is when the O’Reilly staff essentially take the book away from me, turn off my repo access so I don’t keep fiddling, and make the book look great.

As part of that, the editor reads over the book , although there aren’t any surprises because we’ve talked about everything I was doing along the way. The graphic designers turn my crude conceptions of the figures and turn them into nice looking figures, an indexer creates the index, and many other things. This is when O’Reilly knows they have a book to sell and can start planning for its print run and delivery to bookstores.

On my side, this is where I take a break from thinking about the book for several weeks so I can forget about how hard it is to pull something like this together. The next time I think about the book is when O’Reilly sends me the “QC1 proof”, which should be close to the final form save some minor corrections and typesetting adjustments.

Welcome to Learning Perl, the blog

I’m the co-author, with Randal Schwartz and Tom Phoenix, of Learning Perl. I was the lead author on the fourth and fifth editions, which really means I was the person to talk to the publisher and handle the management details of the revisions. Now I’m doing the same for the sixth edition, which, despite it’s particular number, will still cover Perl 5.

There has been quite a lot happening in Perl 5. Things were slow in the Perl 5.8 days, but since Perl 5.10, releases have been regular and many. Since the last edition of Learning Perl, we’ve seen the release of Perl 5.12, and before we manage to get the next edition released, we’ll get Perl 5.14. We’re going to cover through Perl 5.14 in the next edition.

We’ve actually been working on the book for quite awhile. Randal teaches Perl classes through Stonehenge and I teach classes through The Perl Review, all based on Learning Perl. As we teach we come across better ways to explain things, incorporate new material and latest features, and develop new examples. Those make it back into the book when we publish a new edition.

We also take feedback for other trainers, such as Peter Scott from Pacific Systems Design Technologies (PSDT) who uses Learning Perl as the basis for his classes for the O’Reilly School of Technology’s Perl Programming Certificate as well as his Perl Fundamentals video training series.

While we write the next edition, we might be a bit too busy to update this blog, but we’ll try to keep you up to date with our work. Once we’ve finished the writing, we’ll have more time to add extra content on this blog. If everything goes well, the next edition should be out next summer.