<DIV><p>Adopted as the undisputed Perl bible soon after the first edition appeared in 1991, <i>Programming Perl</i> is still the go-to guide for this highly practical language. Perl began life as a super-fueled text processing utility, but quickly evolved into a general purpose programming language that's helped hundreds of thousands of programmers, system administrators, and enthusiasts, like you, get your job done.</p><p>In this much-anticipated update to "the Camel," three renowned Perl authors cover the language up to its current version, Perl 5.14, with a preview of features in the upcoming 5.16. In a world where Unicode is increasingly essential for text processing, Perl offers the best and least painful support of any major language, smoothly integrating Unicode everywhere—including in Perl's most popular feature: regular expressions.</p><p> Important features covered by this update include:</p><ul><li>New keywords and syntax </li><li>I/O layers and encodings </li><li>New backslash escapes </li><li>Unicode 6.0 </li><li>Unicode grapheme clusters and properties </li><li>Named captures in regexes </li><li>Recursive and grammatical patterns </li><li>Expanded coverage of CPAN </li><li>Current best practices </li></ul></div>