Programming Perl: Unmatched power for text processing and scripting

Adopted as the undisputed Perl bible soon after the first edition appeared in 1991, Programming Perl 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.

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.

Important features covered by this update include:
* New keywords and syntax
* I/O layers and encodings
* New backslash escapes
* Unicode 6.0
* Unicode grapheme clusters and properties
* Named captures in regexes
* Recursive and grammatical patterns
* Expanded coverage of CPAN
* Current best practices