Learning Perl Objects, References amp;amp; Modules [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Acknowledgments

In the preface of the first edition of Learning
Perl, I acknowledged the Beaverton
McMenamin's Cedar Hills Pub just down the street
from my house for the "rent-free booth-office
space" while I wrote most of the draft on my
Powerbook 140. Well, like wearing your lucky socks every day when
your favorite team is in the playoffs, I wrote nearly all of this
book (including these words) at the same brewpub, in hopes that the
light of success of the first book will shine on me twice.

This McM's has the same great local microbrew beer
and greasy sandwiches, but they've gotten rid of my
favorite pizza bread, replacing it with new items like marionberry
cobbler (a local treat) and spicy jambalaya. (And they added two
booths, and put in some pool tables.) Also, instead of the Powerbook
140, I'm using a Titanium Powerbook, with 1,000
times more disk, 500 times more memory, and a 200-times-faster CPU
running a real Unix-based operating system (OSX) instead of the
limited MacOS. I also uploaded all of the draft sections (including
this one) over my 144K cell-phone modem and emailed them directly to
the reviewers, instead of having to wait to rush home to my 9600-baud
external modem and phone line. How times have changed!

So, thanks once again to the staff of the
McMenamin's Cedar Hills Pub for the booth space and
hospitality.

Like the third edition of Learning Perl, I also
owe much of what I'm saying here and how
I'm saying it to the decade of students at
Stonehenge Consulting Services who have given me immediate precise
feedback (by their glazed eyes and awkwardly constructed questions)
when I was exceeding the "huh?"
factor threshold. With that feedback over many dozens of
presentations, I was able to keep refining and refactoring the
materials that paved the way for this book.

Speaking of which, those materials started as a half-day
"What's new in Perl
5?" summary commissioned by Margie Levine of Silicon
Graphics, in addition to my frequently presented onsite four-day
Llama course (targeted primarily for Perl Version 4 at the time).
Eventually, I got the idea to beef up those notes into a full course
and enlisted fellow Stonehenge presenter Joseph Hall for the task.
(He's the one that selected the universe from which
the examples are drawn.) Joseph developed a two-day course for
Stonehenge in parallel with his excellent Effective Perl
Programming book, which we then used as the course
textbook (until now).

Other Stonehenge instructors have also dabbled a bit in the
"Packages, References, Objects, and
Modules" course over the years, including Chip
"every source line of the Perl compiler
memorized" Salzenberg,
"don't mess with my
name" brian d
foy, and Tad "something clever
this way comes" McClellan. But the bulk of the
recent changes has been the responsibility of my senior trainer Tom
Phoenix, who has been "Stonehenge employee of the
month" so often that I may have to finally give up
my preferred parking space. Tom manages the materials (just as Tad
manages operations) so I can focus on being the president and the
janitor of Stonehenge. And since I'm naming the
Stonehenge crew, I can't forget my wacky party
manager and marketing consultant (and longtime friend) Bill Harp, who
at this very moment is planning yet another legendary Stonehenge
OSCON party (including the premiere of the book
you're now reading).

Tom Phoenix contributed most exercises in this book and a timely set
of review notes during my writing process, including entire
paragraphs for me to just insert in place of the drivel I had
written. We work well as a team, both in the classroom and in our
joint writing efforts. It is for this effort that
we've acknowledged Tom as a coauthor, but
I'll take direct blame for any parts of the book you
end up hating: none of that could have possibly been
Tom's fault.

I also appreciate my technical reviewers, Mike Stok, Joe Johnston,
Paul Grassie, Damian Conway, Neil Bauman, and David H. Adler, for
their constructive feedback and kind words, although I really was
expecting to be beat up a bit more in the comments. Maybe the time
limit kept y'all nice.

And I especially appreciate and acknowledge Linda Mui of
O'Reilly, who has shepherded this project through
from the beginning, when Tom and I suggested at OSCON 2001 that our
next book should be a sequel, and then made it so.

Of course, a book is nothing without a subject and a distribution
channel, and for that I must acknowledge longtime associates Larry
Wall and Tim O'Reilly. Thanks guys, for creating an
industry that has paid for my toys and essentials for over a decade.

And, as always, a special thanks to Lyle and Jack for teaching me
nearly everything I know about writing and convincing me that I was
much more than a programmer who might learn to write: I was also a
writer who happened to know how to program. Thank you.

And to you, the reader of this book, for whom I toiled away the
countless hours while sipping a cold microbrew and scarfing down a
piece of incredible cheesecake, trying to avoid spilling on my laptop
keyboard: thank you for reading what I've written. I
sincerely hope I've contributed (in at least a small
way) to your Perl proficiency. If you ever meet me on the street,
please say "Hi."[2] I'd
like that. Thank you.

[2] And yes, you can ask a Perl question at the same time. I
don't mind.