Many of the Perl books have some sort of camelid on the cover. The original Programming perl had a camel and the subsequent books followed suit with related animals. Learning Perl got a llama. How many of those animals do you actually get to meet, though? When I was at Kloster Eberbach to teach a Big Nerd Ranch class in 2008, we discovered that there as a llama and alpaca farm up the road so we invited a few over for the afternoon. Here’s me with a fiesty llama:
I put together some of our notes for an update to Learning Perl, 6th Edition. That’s not a promise that all of these will make it into the book, but it’s a list of the topics that we think should be important to the beginner Perler.
One of the biggest changes, structurally, will be our integration of Unicode, which Perl has become quite nice at handling since we last wrote Learning Perl. Obviously that will be a large part of the chapter on input and output, but it can affect much earlier chapters, too.
We have a special post to track new features in the recent versions of Perl, which you might like to read while you wait for the next edition.
pack
//
\K escape in s///
autodie pragma
\w, \d, \s
... operator
\N regex for “not a newline”
each on arrays
when as a statement modifier
delete local
/a, /d, /u match flags
/r on s/// and tr///
given and do
\o{...} for octals
We’ll be updating Learning Perl for the new features since Perl 5.10.0. I’ve been tracking those new features over at The Effective Perler, so you can read about them there. Not every new feature will make it into Learning Perl since we only aim to cover those that are important for beginners. However, since those features profiled at The Effective Perler are the important ones, many of those will show up in the new edition:
O’Reilly Media has been making a video series to go along with their popular books. Randal Schwartz taught the Learning Perl course in front of the cameras and you can now buy it for your own viewing. You can also see it through Safari Books Online.
Here’s a preview:
Trish Gray from the O’Reilly School of Technology introduces Peter Scott, the author of the classes in the Perl Certificate Series. Although the video is a bit markety, Peter makes some interesting comments about Perl and his relationship to it: