Category: Eighth

Pre-order Learning Perl 8th Edition

Learning Perl, 8th Edition, covering up to Perl v5.34, should be available in August. In the previous post I outlined some of the updates, although back then we though v5.32 would be the last version in the Perl 5 range.

It’s now available for pre-order on Amazon. Amazon has an initial price that’s a bit high, but I expect that to come down (the same thing happened for my last book). You will also be able to read it through Safari Online.

I expect to add a few additional exercises to Learning Perl Exercises some of the new material, but that book is still good for this edition. The chapter order has not changed so everything still lines up.


Learning Perl, 8th Edition

O’Reilly Media is going ahead with Learning Perl, 8th Edition to cover v5.32, and to be perhaps the last edition of the title if Perl 7 works out (which you can read about in Preparing for Perl 7 from PerlSchool). This would be the fifth iteration of Tom Phoenix’s original vision that become the third edition. After this edition, I think a completely new text might be in order. That’s a way off though. (However, a summer later, it looks like Perl 7 isn’t happening).

O’Reilly also wants to add some notes, where appropriate, about possible ways to do things for Perl 7. Since Perl 7 is basically v5.32 with different defaults, that’s not that hard.

Some things of I want to update, along with any minor things I might need to change. Nothing major, and some of these I might decide are a bad idea at this level:

Use a temporary file instead of clobbering data

How do you replace the the contents of a file? This is something I’ve been thinking quite a bit about because we often get away with bad practices, and it’s completely within the scope of Learning Perl to know how to do this. It might make a good edition to the next edition of the book.

Someone on Stackoverflow asked if it was okay to read from a file then write back to the same file. In this case, completely read the file and once done, write to the same filename. Most of the answers deal with the mechanics and miss the wisdom of that design.
That’s a problem with tutorial books too: there are only so many pages.

Continue reading “Use a temporary file instead of clobbering data”

Starting to think about an 8th Edition

I’ve finished some other book projects (notably Learning Perl 6 and Mojolicious Web
Clients), and it’s time to think about what I need to do to
refresh my other books.

The 7th Edition covers up to v5.24 and now we’re on to v5.30 (with
v5.32 soon). I track interesting new features at The Effective
Perler.

Some notable things to include: