Bigger and Far Better
Programming Perl, Third Edition
By Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant
O'Reilly & Associates, 2000, 1067pp.
$49.95
By Eugene E. Kim
Now that Perl creator Larry Wall has published the third edition of his venerable Programming Perl, better known as "the camel book," I can reveal my secret shame. I didn't like the second edition of Programming Perl. The second edition was bigger than the first, but also more unwieldy. Though it contained information about Perl 5 that hadn't appeared in any other book, the information wasn't always clear. One of the best examples of its cute, but often ambiguous statements was the line, "An object is simply a referenced thingy."
The third edition of Programming Perl is a much improved manuscript, a definitive guide to the language, and a worthy successor to the first edition. It's impressively longer than the second edition, with more than 400 additional pages, but the new information is significant, and the book as a whole is far better organized.
No More "Thingy"
The most obvious difference between this and previous editions is its coverage of the latest version of Perl, version 5.6. Most of this information is contained in two new sections: "Perl as Technology" and "Perl as Culture."
The former contains information on more recent features, such as the Perl compiler and code generators, Unicode support, and multithreading. It also contains rewritten sections that previously resided in a chapter entitled "Other Oddments," including an extended discussion of the debugger and profiler.
