The second edition of Effective Perl Programming came out toward the middle of the year, but we started this blog much sooner. We had mostly finished the principal writing and were in the editing process so we had some extra time to cover some of the extra material that didn’t make it into the book.
Our first post to this website was on December 31, 2009 at 23:59 (and this one is exactly a year later). We listed the new features of Perl 5.10 that we hoped to cover. It’s lucky we looked back at that post because we’ve been a bit remiss for that version of Perl. We have done quite well covering new features in Perl 5.12 and the upcoming features in Perl 5.14. We even have a new feature category where you can see the indices for each version.
We set out to make one meaty post per week, something on the same scale, and we’ve done that. Usually they came out on Sunday (Chicago time), but sometimes we took an extra day. These weren’t topics that many people, or even the documentation, had explored. Sometimes we even uncovered bugs in perl. And, we completed our once a weekly goal, so there are 52 new Items. The book has 120 Items, so we almost have half of another book.
Some topics weren’t so meaty, so we made some mid-week bonus Items, too. These were mostly new features or new idioms that we wanted to cover but didn’t warrant one of our weekly posts.
We gave some talks based on the book too, and you can get our conference slides in some cases.
Our wish list still has some Items to cover, and you should see most of those in the next year. Some of those topics are pretty big though, so we have to figure out how to handle them.
In all, it’s been a good year and we’re looking forward to the next one, whatever our next year’s goals might be.