O'Reilly Learning Lab: $200 Instant Rebate -- 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. This month, receive a $200 instant rebate (and a Certificate from the University of Illinois Office of Continuing Education upon course completion) when you enroll in any Certificate Series.

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.

O'Reilly Learning Lab: $200 Instant Rebate -- 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 Unix environment. This month, receive a $200 instant rebate (and a Certificate from the University of Illinois upon course completion) when you enroll in any Certificate Series.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

O'Reilly Partners with No Starch, Paraglyph, and Syngress -- We're pleased to announce a collaboration between like-minded companies: As of January 1, 2004, O'Reilly is the North American distributor for three innovative small presses: No Starch Press, Paraglyph Press, and Syngress Publishing. O'Reilly will handle retail and direct sales, warehousing, and shipping, as well as provide direct marketing and PR support for these publishers with whom our philosophies are aligned. We invite you to give them a close look.

Spidering Hacks -- Want to save time as well as extra trips to your favorite web sites? Here are two hacks--the first on using Template::Extract, a Perl module that allows you to scrape a web page to generate RSS feeds; and the second on using a program called dailystrips to grab all your favorite online comic strips in one HTML file--excerpted from the recently released Spidering Hacks.

One Hump or Two? If Perl is your cup of tea, O'Reilly's T-shirt featuring the Perl camel can be your sugar cube. Add some O'Reilly coasters and mugs, and you've got the ingredients for a whole tea party. Find the makings at ThinkGeek.

A Chromosome at a Time with Perl, Part 2 -- In the conclusion to his two-part series on using Perl in the bioinformatics realm, James Tisdall shows how references can speed up a subroutine call, how to bypass the overhead of subroutine calls entirely, and how to quantify the behavior of your code. James is the author of Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics.

More Than One Way -- Any Perl programmer will tell you, "There's more than one way to do it." Get the shirt that says it plain and simple, and find more O'Reilly gear at ThinkGeek.

A Chromosome at a Time with Perl -- James Tisdall offers a handful of tricks that will enable Perl programmers to write performance-efficient code for dealing with large amounts of biological sequence data. James is the author of the upcoming Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics.

Cooking with Perl -- Learn how to use SQL without a database server and how to send attachments in mail, in the latest sample recipes from O'Reilly's recently released Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition.

Five Habits for Successful Regular Expressions -- Tony Stubblebine shows how to avoid a lot of trial and error in your regular expression development by adopting these five habits, applicable to nearly any regex implementation. Tony is the author of Regular Expression Pocket Reference.

Cooking with Perl -- The second edition of Perl Cookbook is about to hit the streets. Get a taste of what we've cooked up with these sample recipes on "Matching Nested Patterns" and "Pretending a String Is a File." And reserve a copy of Perl Cookbook today.

Exegesis 6 -- Damian Conway explains how the new syntax and semantics of subroutines in Perl 6 make for cleaner, simpler, and more powerful code. For a list of O'Reilly's Perl books and articles, see perl.oreilly.com.

State of the Onion 2003 -- In this full-length transcript of Larry Wall's annual report on the state of Perl, Larry talks about being unreasonable, unwilling, and impossible. For the state of O'Reilly's Perl books, check out perl.oreilly.com.

An Interview with the Author of Practical mod_perl -- In this ONLamp.com interview with chromatic, Stas Bekman talks about his work, mod_perl 2, and what it's like to be sponsored to work on free software full-time. Stas is the author of O'Reilly's recently released Practical mod_perl.

Perl 6 Design Philosophy -- Many Perl 6 design decisions have been influenced by the principles of natural language. For an in-depth discussion of some of the most important principles and their impact on Perl 6, check out this excerpt from Chapter 3 of Perl 6 Essentials.

Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules Book Review -- Russell Dyer's book review for UnixReview.com looks at O'Reilly's newest Perl offering, saying it "fills a vacancy for Perl programmers who are looking to improve their skills or to grow in their careers." For a thorough introduction to advanced programming in Perl, be sure to check out Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules.