I have the 1st edition, and considered it a good resource. It's actually already a second-ish edition, as the true first had a different name: Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules, which I also have. :) (Both are alpaca books.) At any rate, this question made me curious enough that I pulled out my copy of Intermediate Perl, 1st, and compared its table of contents with the new 2nd edition. There are a number of differences. The 2nd chapter of the 1st edition has been moved to chapter three, and the using modules chapter promoted to chapter two in the 2nd edition. Many of the chapters in the 2nd edition contain new sub-headings. For example, the chapter on using modules now includes a discussion of local::lib.
The second edition has dropped the chapter on Regular Expression References, but added a chapter on creating your own Perl distribution. The 2nd edition has added a chapter on Moose as well.
If you own the 1st edition, you can wait for O'Reilly to update their website to offer the customary 40% of the latest print edition, or 50% off the latest ebook edition. There's almost always special upgrade pricing. The eBook retails for $31.99, so when the 50% off upgrade becomes available that will drop it to about $16US. No shipping cost on eBooks, of course. That doesn't seem like such a bad deal. Often I'll upgrade to latest editions just to see what the authors considered important enough to change in the new edition, and how they address it.
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What amazing timing! The ebook just went on sale today for 50% off (and the sale lasts for the week).
Edit: So, it was mentioned that this looks like a spam message (and now that I look at it again, it really does). However, there really is a sale!! And it lasts all week!! And it is for ALL of O'Reilly's perl books!!! (You just have to wire a modest sum to a Prince in Nigeria and then we can unlock the coupon codes from the bank vault...). Seriously though, even-numbered pages are free all week long.
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It's not spam. It's a relevant mention of how to obtain the book that is the subject of this thread at a 50% discount from the publisher (or any other Perl book from that manufacturer). Mention that these sorts of discounts come up again from time to time, and you have a post that is still of value after the sale expires in a few days. Seriously, people need to lighten up if they consider you helping people reading this thread to obtain the book at half the price to be spamy behavior.
O'Reilly also offers discounts to members of Perl Monger groups by virtue of PM's affiliation with OSCON, if I'm not mistaken.
The Monastery is about enhancing peoples' education with respect to Perl. Let's not prohibit the mention of a book sale in a thread that talks about a book aimed at achieving a compatible goal.
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I've just bought the electronic version which has a nice syntax coloring. I haven't read it thoroughly yet but I noticed two chapters added ("Regular Expression References", "Introduction to Moose").
Update: Read brian's answers for O’Reilly PR to get more information directly from one of the authors.
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I haven't a clue about the book but a bit of searching says: "This second edition covers recent changes to the language up to version 5.14."
I doubt it will be worth it. You should be able to pick the new features up yourself without much effort. And given that the first edition was released in 2006, the state (or rather, style) of Perl programming has not changed much (you should only be looking for a new book if the previous one was published around 2001 or earlier)
(I'm not sure that came out OK. I mean the old adage that Perl code written in 1994 looks very different than Perl code written in 2002, in terms of best practices)
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I bought the 2nd edition, but being a beginner, I'm not experienced enough to be able to identify 'dramatic differences'. However, given it's been 6-7 yrs since the first edition, I'd say there must be some new concepts worth exploring for that money, like in any other updated text. For what it's worth...
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