What is Modern Perl?

Perl is a popular, powerful, and widely used programming language. Over its twenty year lifespan, it's powered millions of systems worldwide, moving trillions of dollars. More importantly, it's helped countless people get their work done effectively.

The Perl community has a reputation for clever solutions -- and a reputation for institutional knowledge that isn't always clear to novices and neophytes. Modern Perl, written with this knowledge, can be very clean, very maintainable, and very effective.

That knowledge should be available to everyone. This book will teach you how to program Perl well by teaching you how to understand Perl's design, its syntax, and its semantics.

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/01/why-modern-perl.html

Intended Audience

I assume readers have some familiarity with Perl. They should have it installed and should know how to write, edit, save, and run Perl programs. They don't necessarily have to have finished reading a tutorial such as Learning Perl or Beginning Perl, but they should be sufficiently familiar with programming to be able to follow along with examples.

I try not to assume complete knowledge of even basic constructs; I try to explain them in detail, as understanding subtleties of design and implementation are important to mastering the subject of Perl.

Reviewer Guidelines

I appreciate all suggestions and critiques, especially:

• is the work accurate?
• is the work complete?
• is the work coherent?
• are there missing sections and subjects?
• are the examples effective?
• is the flow of information appropriate?

Building this Book

You need a modern version of Perl installed. I recommend Perl 5.10.1, but anything newer than 5.8.6 should work.

You should also have Pod::PseudoPod 0.16 or newer installed with its dependencies.

From the top level directory of a checkout, build the individual chapters with:

$ perl build/tools/build_chapters.pl

The chapter sources are in the sections/ directory. Each chapter has a corresponding chapter_nn.pod file. Each file contains multiple POD links which refer to other files in the sections/ directory. Each of those files contains a PseudoPOD Z<> anchor.

The build_chapters.pl program weaves these sections into chapters and writes them to POD files in build/chapters.

(This process makes it easy to rearrange sections within and between chapters without generating huge diffs.)

To build HTML from these woven chapters:

$ perl build/tools/build_html.pl

This will produce nicely-formatted HTML in the build/html/ directory. If anything looks wrong, it's a mistake on my part (or a CSS problem) and patches are very welcome.

To build an ePub eBook from the woven chapters:

$ perl build/tools/build_epub.pl

This will produce an ePub eBook in the build/epub/ directory.

To build PDFs from the chapters:

$ perl build/tools/build_pdf.pl

This will build PDFs in the build/pdf directory. You must have App::pod2pdf installed from the CPAN.

Contributing to Modern Perl

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. For more details, see:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

Please feel free to point people to this repository. Suggestions and contributions are welcome. You have the right to redistribute modified versions, but I ask (though do not require) you to file bugs or submit pull requests against this repository.

This book is available in print and in formatted electronic formats from Onyx Neon Press:

http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html

The electronic versions are available for free, with no restrictions on free redistribution.