Programming Perl, 3rd Edition

What's New in This Edition

Well, almost everything.

Even where we kept the good bits from the previous edition (and there were quite a few good bits, we'll admit), we've heavily revised and reorganized the current edition with several goals in mind. First, we wanted to increase the accessibility of the book to people coming from backgrounds other than computer science. We've made fewer assumptions about what the reader will know in advance. At the same time, we've kept the exposition lively in the hope that people who are already familiar with some of the material will not fall asleep reading it.

Second, we wanted to present the very latest developments in Perl itself. To that end, we have not been shy about presenting the current state of the work, even where we feel that it is still experimental. While the core of Perl has been rock solid for years, the pace of development for some of the experimental extensions can be quite torrid at times. We'll tell you honestly when we think the online documentation will be more reliable than what we have written here. Perl is a blue-collar language, so we're not afraid to call a spade a shovel.

Third, we wanted you to be able to find your way around in the book more easily, so we've broken this edition up into smaller, more coherent chapters and reorganized them into meaningful parts. Here's how the new edition is laid out:

Part I

Getting started is always the hardest part. This part presents the fundamental ideas of Perl in an informal, curl-up-in-your-favorite-chair ...