Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition

Preface

It was all Nathan Torkington’s fault. Our Antipodean programmer, editor, and O’Reilly conference supremo friend asked me to update the original Advanced Perl Programming way back in 2002.

The Perl world had changed drastically in the five years since the publication of the first edition, and it continues to change. Particularly, we’ve seen a shift away from techniques and toward resources—from doing things yourself with Perl to using what other people have done with Perl. In essence, advanced Perl programming has become more a matter of knowing where to find what you need on the CPAN,^[*] rather than a matter of knowing what to do.

Perl changed in other ways, too: the announcement of Perl 6 in 2000 ironically caused a renewed interest in Perl 5, with people stretching Perl in new and interesting directions to implement some of the ideas and blue-skies thinking about Perl 6. Contrary to what we all thought back then, far from killing off Perl 5, Perl 6’s development has made it stronger and ensured it will be around longer.

So it was in this context that it made sense to update Advanced Perl Programming to reflect the changes in Perl and in the CPAN. We also wanted the new edition to be more in the spirit of Perl—to focus on how to achieve practical tasks with a minimum of fuss. This is why we put together chapters on parsing techniques, on dealing with natural language documents, on testing your code, and so on.

But this book is just a beginning; however tempting it was to try ...