O’Reilly Media is going ahead with Learning Perl, 8th Edition to cover v5.32, and to be perhaps the last edition of the title if Perl 7 works out (which you can read about in Preparing for Perl 7 from PerlSchool). This would be the fifth iteration of Tom Phoenix’s original vision that become the third edition. After this edition, I think a completely new text might be in order. That’s a way off though. (However, a summer later, it looks like Perl 7 isn’t happening).
O’Reilly also wants to add some notes, where appropriate, about possible ways to do things for Perl 7. Since Perl 7 is basically v5.32 with different defaults, that’s not that hard.
Some things of I want to update, along with any minor things I might need to change. Nothing major, and some of these I might decide are a bad idea at this level:
- Minor updates for Unicode 13
- Indented here docs (v5.26)
eachon arrays (v5.12)- Initialize aggregates with
state(v5.28) - Push subroutine signatures a little harder, along with the
:prototypeattribute (v5.20) - The
__SUB__token (v5.16) - The secure readline:
<<>> - Update
keysin scalar context (v5.26) - Escape left brace in regexes (v5.26, not v5.28, but then again in v5.30)
- Unicode character class set operations, with the
/xxflag. - Branch reset operator (v5.10)
- The
@{^CAPTURE}variable (v5.26) - The
\Ncharacter class (v5.12) - The current directory is missing from
@INC(v5.26) - The hash chunk slice (v5.20)
- Update any references to Perl 6 to use Raku, and explain that name change. This is mostly in the introduction where I check that people have the right book and language. If you want Raku, you should get Learning Perl 6.