Perl is a free and powerful programming language that has grown explosively in popularity since its initial debut in 1987. The first edition of this book hit the shelves in 1991, and was quickly adopted as the undisputed bible of the language. " Programming Perl " is not just a book about Perl. It is also a unique introduction to the language and its culture, as you would expect only from. its authors. Larry Wall is the inventor of Perl and provides a unique perspective on the evolution of Perl and its future direction. Tom Christiansen was one of Perl's first champions and lives and breathes the intricacies of Perl as few other mortals do. Jon Orwant is the editor of " The Perl journal ", which has brought together the Perl community as a common forum for new developments in Perl. Any Perl book can show you the syntax of Perl's functions, but only this one is the definitive guidebook that includes all the nooks and crannies of the language. Any Perl book can list endless features, but only this one can tell you why those features were created and how to use them idiomatically. Any Perl book can have a title, but only this book is affectionately known by all Perl programmers as "The Camel." Ever since its origins as a high-level language for writing portable tools in cross-platform environments, Perl has been widely recognized as an industrial-strength power tool that gets the job done wherever you are. It is especially useful for system administration and web programming. Perl is bundled as a standard component for practically every flavor of Unix (including Linux), but it is also used extensively on Microsoft Windows and is available for virtually every other operating system you'll run across. Amiga, BeOS, VMS, MVS, and the Apple Macintosh are just a small subset of the platforms that Perl has been ported to. What's new in this edition ? Practically everything. This third edition of " Programming Perl " has not only been expanded to cover the new 5*6 release of Perl, it also has been completely reorganized and fortified with numerous examples. Most existing topics have been dramatically reworked from the ground up, like object-oriented programming and regular expressions, and many brand new chapters have been added, including those on profiling, pod, Unicode, threading, compiling, and Perl internals. Part bible, part encyclopedia, and part almanac, this is the essential book on Perl.