Design Patterns in Modern Perl - now in paperback

Last year we published Mohammad Sajid Anwar's Design Patterns in Modern Perl, and recently we made it available as a print-on-demand paperback as well as an ebook.

The paperback has been selling well enough to confirm something I probably should have realised sooner: plenty of Perl programmers still like buying physical books.

So this won't be a one-off. New Perl School books will generally be available as both ebooks and paperbacks, and we'll be looking at which books from the existing catalogue make sense to bring into print too.

Data Munging with Perl is coming back

Work is progressing well on the second edition of Data Munging with Perl, 25 years after the original edition was published.

A lot has changed in 25 years. The new edition uses modern Perl and modern CPAN modules, and reflects the data formats we're actually dealing with today — which means rather less XML and rather more JSON and YAML.

I'm aiming to publish it around the London Perl Workshop on 21 November, and, if everything goes according to plan, I'll have some paperback copies with me there.

You don't have to wait until November, though. There's already a work-in-progress edition on Leanpub, and anyone who buys that will receive updates as the book develops and the final version when it's published.

Could you write a Perl book?

Finally, Perl School isn't supposed to be a vehicle for publishing Dave Cross books.

Traditional technical publishers largely stopped commissioning Perl books years ago, but there are still plenty of people with useful Perl knowledge that deserves to be written down.

So if there's a Perl subject you know particularly well — even if you think it's far too specialised to interest a conventional publisher — I'd be interested in hearing from you.

We've recently rewritten our "Write for us" page to explain how Perl School works. There's no need for a finished manuscript or even a formal proposal.