Q3 2010 is a good time for Perl books. Modern Perl: The Book is almost ready to go to the printer. If you're interested in understanding Perl 5, I'm happy to recommend the book to you.

(I also heartily recommend Effective Perl Programming 2E. I haven't finished reading it yet, but what I've read has been very good.)

You can help make this books even better. I've gone through hundreds of comments on the Modern Perl draft book, and the text is much better for it. Thank you to everyone who's contributed. I'd love to get more comments, especially on later chapters (regular expressions, objects, style) from anyone interested in Perl, whether the freshest novice or Larry's brother in law (Perl user #1). The easiest way for me to take comments is if you fork the Modern Perl Book Github repository and send me a pull request, but you can file issues there or mail me directly if you prefer.

We'll keep updating the books even after we publish paper versions, and we'll keep updating electronic versions, and certainly we'll happily revise the paper versions—but the more feedback we get in the next two weeks, the better the books will be for people who aren't as well connected in the Perl world as you are. (You're reading this; you're way ahead of a lot of people we'd like very much to reach.)

Thanks for all of your help. It's a good time to be programming Perl again.

Editor's note: an earlier version of this post referred to another book which has since been cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience.