O'Reilly Programming Perl, 4th Edition 1184pages software manual

Programming Perl, 4th Edition, 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