Prefactoring -- If you understand object-oriented design, and you want to save time and money by considering more efficient designs before you begin your project, Prefactoring will show you the way. This practical, thought-provoking guide details prefactoring guidelines in design, code, and testing, derived from lessons learned by many developers over the years. With these guidelines, you'll create more readable code before you reach the second-guessing stage. Sample Chapter 2, The System in So Many Words (PDF), is available free online.

Web Programming Certificate Series Special -- Go from newbie to know-how in six 40-hour courses spanning the client-server spectrum. Upon completion of the series, receive a Certificate of Professional Development from the University of Illinois Office of Continuing Education. Keep your free O'Reilly books for reference and your Learning Lab account as an online portfolio. Pre-enroll in all six courses and receive a $300 instant rebate. Offer expires December 31st.

Porting Test::Builder to Perl 6 -- With Pugs and Parrot playing nicely and bringing Perl 6 to the rest of us, enterprising early adopters are experimenting with porting their popular Perl 5 modules to Perl 6. O'Reilly editor chromatic recently pushed the limits of Pugs by porting Test::Builder to Perl 6. Here's what he learned about Perl 6, Pugs, and his design along the way. chromatic is the coauthor of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook.

Is Perl Still Relevant? -- With the emergence of .NET, J2EE, Python, PHP, et al., one reader asks whether Perl has lost its niche as a scripting glue language? Tim O'Reilly comments in this Ask Tim.

Ten Essential Development Practices -- Perl lets you be productive in everything from quick-and-dirty throwaway programs to big, business-critical applications. Building the latter requires some discipline, though. Damian Conway shares ten essential development practices to make your Perl programming easier, more reliable, and even more enjoyable. Damian is the author of Perl Best Practices.

Batch-Running Word Macros from the DOS Command Line -- Looking for an easy way to run any Word macro, on any number of files, right from the DOS command line? Andrew Savikas shows how to do just that, using Perl, Python, and Ruby, with code samples for each scripting language. Andrew is the author of Word Hacks.

History of Programming Languages -- For 50 years, computer programmers have been writing code, and now, there are more than 2,500 documented programming languages. O'Reilly has produced a poster called History of Programming Languages, which plots over 50 programming languages on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline. The poster is available online in PDF format, but while supplies last, U.S. residents can also get a hard copy of the poster free when purchasing two books through oreilly.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.