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Announcing Rough Cuts!
O'Reilly's Safari Books Online has just announced a new
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Greetings, Perl hackers. No one has reported whether the
camel (Amelia)
saw her shadow yesterday, so Perl 6 may still be a few weeks
away. In the
meantime, there's plenty of good information on Perl 5 still
to publish.
Here's what's new since the last biweekly Perl newsletter.
* Perl News in Brief
Registration has opened for YAPC::Asia 2006. If you're
going to be in
Tokyo this spring, be sure to register!
<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/30/107230>
ActiveState has announced its independence yet again.
(ActiveState
distributes ActivePerl and several other dynamic programming
languages.)
<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/31/0920231>
Audrey Tang and the lambdacamels have released Pugs 6.2.11.
The next
release looks like it may be the long-awaited Pugs 6.28,
with full OO
support. Go Pugs!
<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/02/0039245>
Stable pumpking (not that Rafael is unstable...) Nicholas
Clark has
released Perl 5.8.8. This version includes several bug
fixes, updates to
core modules, and plenty of code cleanup and optimizations.
Upgrade
soon!
<http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/02/1714258>
Development pumpking Rafael Garcia-Suarez also released the
long-awaited
Perl 5.9.3. This is the development version of Perl that
will become Perl
5.10. If you liked the new features of Perl 5.8.8, you'll
love Perl 5.9.3.
(Of course, this is a development version, so don't wipe out
your stable
version instead.)
Josh McAdams and Perlcast interviewed Chad Fowler, author of
"My Job Went
to India," about ways to keep your programming edge as
well as your job:
<http://www.perlcast.com/2006/01/27/interview-w
ith-chad-fowler/>
* Perl.com Articles
Simon Cozens, Perl.com editor emeritus, wrote a book last
year called
"Advanced Perl Programming." In the past year,
he's learned more about
what he wishes he had put in the book. Fortunately,
"More Advanced Perl
Programming" explains it all. Here's more to learn to
become a Perl
wizard. You can do it!
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/01/26/more_advanc
ed_perl.html>
One of the trickiest parts of testing is the graphical front
end of your
programs. How do you know it works? How can you automate
it? If you're
using X11, the X11::GUITest module can help run GUIs from
your test suite.
George Nistorica explains how it works, where it doesn't
work, and why you
should consider adding features to the module:
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/02/02/x11_gui_testin
g.html>
* The Conclusion
That's it for this newsletter. Upgrade to Perl 5.8.8. Test
your code
against Perl 5.9.3. Report back to the Perl 5 porters.
Stay warm (or
cool, if you're south of the equator).
Until next time,
- c
chromatic oreilly.com
Editor, Perl.com, et cetera
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*** Featured Articles ***
Test-Driving X11 GUIs
Is GUI testing as difficult as it seems? Maybe not, with the
right testing
libraries. George Nistorica shows what X11::GUITest can and
can't do to
make your Unix and Unix-like applications more robust.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/02/02/x11_gui_testin
g.html>
***
More Advancements in Perl Programming
What's advanced Perl programming? The definition has changed
over the
years. For a while it was XS and GUIs and typeglobs and OO.
Now a lot of
it is using CPAN effectively. Since completing Advanced Perl
Programming,
Second Edition, Simon Cozens has discovered even more ways
to work more
smartly and effectively. Here's what he's learned.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/01/26/more_advanc
ed_perl.html>
***
Analyzing HTML with Perl
Kendrew Lau taught HTML development to business students.
Grading web
pages by hand was tedious--but Perl came to the rescue.
Here's how Perl
and HTML parsing modules helped make teaching fun again.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/01/19/analyzing_html.
html>
***
What Is Perl 6
Perl 6 is the long-awaited rewrite of the venerable Perl
programming
language. What's the status? What's changing? What's staying
the same? Why
does Perl need a rewrite anyway? chromatic attempts to
answer all of these
questions.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/01/12/what_is_perl_6.
html>
***
Lexing Your Data
Perl is famous for its text-processing capabilities.
However, sometimes
the data you want to process is too complicated for regular
expressions
and you reach for a parser for HTML, RTF, or other common
format. What
happens you don't have a pre-defined parser, but the text
you need to work
with is too complicated for regular expressions? Curtis Poe
shows how to
do proper lexing with Perl.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/01/05/parsing.html>
***
A Timely Start
A well-written Perl program should, in theory, beat a shell
script, right?
In theory. In practice, sometimes the details of your Perl
installation
have more to do with why your program is slow than you might
believe.
Jean-Louis Leroy recently tracked down a bottleneck and
wrote up his
experiences with making Perl programs start faster.
<http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/12/21/a_timely_start.
html>
***
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Bob Parks
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<http://makezine.com/ma
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