Update: PDFs, ePub, and Mobi files are available from Modern Perl: The Book, and you can read Modern Perl: The Book online now!

The Modern Perl book went to the printer earlier this week; this is the 2011-2012 edition.

You can already preorder Modern Perl: 2011-2012 from Amazon and it'll be available from other bookstores in the next couple of days. I expect copies to ship by early next week.

What's new?

I closed every bug filed against the previous edition—a handful of typos, a few confusing sections, and some suggestions on improvements. I took most of these suggestions.

I also revised almost every paragraph of the book, even at the sentence level. While I'm proud of the first edition, this new edition is clearer, shorter, more concise, and more accurate.

I removed some sections that didn't work. This didn't amount to much, but some of the things I recommended made little sense anymore and some of the experimental modules I mentioned turned out to be less useful than hoped. You won't miss them. This includes a big revision of the smart matching section in anticipation of changes in 5.16 and 5.18 (simplicity is the rule of the day; the simpler your use of the operator, the less risk you face for confusing behavior and edge cases).

I also added explanations for the new features in Perl 5.14, especially the /r modifier on regular expressions, and prepared for further features added in 5.16.

You might notice subtle improvements in formatting; the font size used for code examples is larger and callouts are much more attractive. We're still experimenting with the best way to format books to make readable text while avoiding brick-sized tomes, so feedback is more than welcome.

As with the first edition, we'll make electronic versions available for free from the Onyx Neon site. We hope to have ePub versions ready in the next two weeks. We'll also put raw HTML online on modernperlbooks.com at the same time (this also allows us to link to translations with greater ease). In addition, we're making most of our publishing tools available as CPAN distributions, including the formatting modules ( Pod::PseudoPod::DOM ) and the rendering pipeline ( Pod::PseudoPod::Book ). This will allow you to make your own version of the book in other languages if you desire, or to create new and attractive books in many formats. We'll make our own Kindle version, rather than using Amazon's conversion tools (they didn't work as well as we'd hoped), and we hope to get the book in the Nook store as well.

We plan to release a new version of the book late this year or early next year to cover 5.14 and 5.16. We'll almost certainly drop support and mention of 5.10.

We couldn't have done this book without you. Thanks for reading. Please share with your friends.