The O'Reilly site now says to expect it in December 2011. It is surprising they don't even have cover art for it on their own site yet. I'm pleased that it will be a hefty 1000 pages though. Whenever it gets here. :)
December 2011 is likely correct, as we’ve already turned it in. However, 1,000 pages is undershooting by around 100 pages. We cut out like 150 pages of old reference material that changes too quickly to be worth printing (like diagnostic messages), but we wrote a lot of new stuff, so it is currently running about 25 pages over the previous edition’s 1,070. So call it 1,100 pages in round numbers; I never remember now whether the trip through Production tends to grow or shrink it. My guess is they will cause more felicitous page breaks so it may grow a few pages without changing the number of words at all.
And there is indeed cover art right here, but that will have to be updated now that Brian joined the project. We couldn’t have done it without him; he did all the nasty stuff I couldn’t bring myself to bite off, and he did the pod management, too. We’ve been lucky to have had about 20 external reviewers from the general community, who have been a really great help.
What do you get in place of a diagnostics chaper? We glossed a lot more perlingo, but that probably isn’t what you’re looking for, eh? :)
Almost all the new work is in the core, not the periphery. Chapters 3 and 4 on operators and statements grew more than you might have expected, but the real winner here is Chapter 5, the regex chapter. Already one of the longer chapters, it’s grown by 50% in this edition, because regexes really are at the heart of what makes Perl, Perl — and because v5.10 added a great deal to the power of our regexes, pushing them into places unlike what any other regex engine can tackle. The regex chapter is almost a book in itself. Add in the brand new and rather beefy (>30 pages) Unicode chapter which now directly follows regexes as Chapter 6, and it probably is its own book. The Functions chapter got a lot of work, too, with everything updated for v5.16, at least as well as we can foresee the future. :)
There are other changes, too, but it’s still recognizably the same book. There was no massive structural rewrite the way there was between the second and third edition. Just a bit of updating and minor rearrangement. Hm, that sounds more minor than is right, since there are 175 new pages not counting the updated/changed ones.
Well, you’ll see when it gets here.
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