[sf-perl] Fw: Perl 5.14.2 is now available

[Joseph Brenner]

Rich Morin <rdm at cfcl.com> wrote:

> It has been a while since I did any real Perl programming
> and I'd like to brush up on the major changes.

I don't know that there have been any really major changes to perl
itself.   There's the smart match operator (~~) and the given/when
construct (which both appear to be too clever and in need of further
revision).

There have been some shifts in trends in perl progamming, though,
e.g. Moose is clearly in and the various "InsideOut" objects are out,
DBIx::Class is the most popular ORM, though Rose has it's fans,
Template Toolkit is still leading, though Mason has it's fans, and so
on.

The Best Practices for dealing with Unicode are still evolving. You
might look up tchrist on the subject some time, for example:

 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6162484/why-does-modern-perl-avoid-utf-8-b$

> Are there any particular books (etc) which would give an
> overview of how Perl 5 (syntax, idioms, practices, etc.)
> have changed over the past several years?

As has been pointed out, the "Modern Perl" book by chromatic is the
obvious pick:

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

For perl news, I like the perl sphere blog aggregator:

   http://perlsphere.net/

Another trend of sorts is that the perl insiders seem to have decided
that stackoverflow is more important than perlmonks.

> For example, would the latest version of the Camel provide
> a good overview?

Whoa.  There's a fourth camel out now.  I hadn't heard:

   http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596004927.do