Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, 2nd Edition provides an insider's look at what's coming in the widely anticipated Perl 6. It uncovers groundbreaking new developments in Parrot, and the most revolutionary change in the language itself, Apocalypse 12 on objects. The book also expands coverage of Apocalypse 5 (regular expressions) and Apocalypse 6 (subroutines). This is the only book to reveal all the ingenious developments that will make Perl 6 more powerful and easier to use. Sample Chapter 10: Parrot Intermediate Representation, is available free online.

Larry Wall's State of the Onion -- At this year's O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Larry Wall delivered his eighth annual State of the Onion address, in which he publicly psychoanalyzed himself while relating screensavers ("my mind is like a screensaver that no one can ever look at") to surgery, Perl, and the Perl community. Larry's speech, including links to his screensavers that you can view with xscreensaver-demo, is online at perl.com.

When Will Perl 6 Ever Get Done? It's difficult to make predictions about when Perl 6 will be released. For one thing, Perl is still and always under development; for another, there's no rush. perl.com editor Simon Cozens shares what he heard from Perl 6 designers and implementers in this month's Ask Tim.

Cultured Perl: Three Essential Perl Books -- In a recent Cultured Perl column on IBM DeveloperWorks comes a review of what the reviewer calls three "essential Perl books": O'Reilly Media's Perl 6 Essentials, Perl Cookbook, and Perl Template Toolkit. To read more about these and all of O'Reilly's Perl books, visit perl.oreilly.com.

SafariU: Create, Customize, and Share Teaching Material -- Looking for a way to truly customize your course textbook and offer students exactly the material you choose to teach, while saving them a good bit of money? Become a SafariU beta tester and check out the new web-based publishing platform from O'Reilly that allows you to create custom textbooks and online syllabi.

An Interview with Allison Randal -- In this Perl.com interview, Simon Cozens talks to Allison Randal, the president of the Perl Foundation and the project manager for Perl 6, about the goals of the Foundation, YAPC, and the Perl 6 effort. Allison is a coauthor of O'Reilly's upcoming Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, 2nd Edition.

Mastering Regular Expressions Live on Safari -- Due to popular demand, O'Reilly's indispensable guide to regular expressions is available online through Safari. Whether you're programming in Perl, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, MySQL, awk, Emacs, or any language using the .NET Framework, you should know how to use regular expressions to manipulate text and data. Powerful solutions to real-world problems are now at your fingertips. If you haven't been on Safari yet, read this book and up to nine others with a free trial subscription.

Apocalypse 12 -- Larry Wall writes, "Some people will be surprised to hear it, but Perl is a minimalist language at heart." Here he explains how objects and classes are supposed to work in Perl 6. Join Larry and Damian Conway this July in Portland for their OSCON session on Perl 6.

Your O'Reilly Account: New, Single Sign On -- O'Reilly customers and guests now have a single address and one password to access all things O'Reilly, from oreilly.com and Safari Bookshelf to all of the O'Reilly Network sites and DevCenters. When possible, we've consolidated your prior, separate accounts into one new account. Logging into the new system is quick and easy; details on how to do it have been emailed to you, and you can read more about O'Reilly's single sign on in Tony Stubblebine's weblog.

Building a Parrot Compiler -- The virtual machine for Perl 6 is not just for Perl 6 anymore. Parrot is a high-level, high-performance target for all sorts of languages. Dan Sugalski, coauthor of Perl 6 Essentials, demonstrates by building a compiler for a vintage 4GL. Dan and his coauthor, Allison Randal, are both speaking at July's Open Source Convention.

Exegesis 7 for Perl 6 -- At first glance, Perl 6 may seem like something of a backwards step--it has extra quotation marks and commas that Perl 5 didn't require. But the new formatting interface does have several distinct advantages. Damian Conway explains. Get all of O'Reilly's Perl books and articles at perl.oreilly.com.

A Horse Is a Horse, of Course, of Course--Or Is It? Perl classes and subroutines can get your horses to neigh, but you'll need to establish an instance and instance variables to distinguish between the Palomino and the Clydesdale. Find out how in Chapter 9 of Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules, the book that picks up where Learning Perl leaves off. If you like this chapter, read the whole book (and up to nine others) on Safari with a free trial subscription.

Safari Gets Bigger and Better -- There are now more than 2,000 books from the industry's leading technical publishers available on Safari Bookshelf. As the library grows, so does its functionality: searches are powerfully precise and as broad or specific as you wish; and now, with a Safari Max subscription, you can download chapters to read offline. Safari will help you save time, reduce errors, keep current, and save more money than ever with up to 35% off print copies of your favorite books. If you haven't yet gone on Safari, try a free trial subscription.

How We Wrote the Template Toolkit Book -- There are a number of tools available for writing books. Authors Dave Cross, Darren Chamberlain, and Andy Wardley are all Perl hackers, so when they got together to write a book, it didn't take them long to agree to use POD (Plain Old Documentation). Here's how they practiced what they preached with Perl Template Toolkit.