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.

Save $200 on a Learning Lab Certificate -- Learning programming languages and development techniques has never been easier. Using your web browser and Useractive's Learning Sandbox technology, the Learning Lab gives you hands-on, online training in a creative environment. And for a limited time, when you enroll in any of our four certificate series, you'll receive a $200 instant rebate (and a certificate from the University of Illinois College of Extended Learning upon course completion). Offer expires March 31.

Perl Tackles HIPAA Compliancy -- Dietrich Schmitz of the SUNY Upstate Medical University writes, "It is so true that Perl 'makes the simple things easy and the hard things possible'." Dietrich describes how he used Perl in writing an in-house application to make the Claims and Patient Billing system HIPAA-compliant, in this latest Perl Success Story.

Easy Healthcare Billing with Perl -- Billing applications usually contain complex rules that transform raw activity into billable activity. This is especially true in healthcare where fixed prices are applied for repeated medical services. Marc-Henri Poget, software project manager at the University Hospital of Lausanne, Switzerland, shares his experiences creating a billing application with Perl. You'll find many examples of Perl in action in O'Reilly's Perl Success Stories.

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.

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.