Here is what is new at the Perl Beginners’ since the last update roughly three years ago.

1. We have a mirror of an old version of the Hyperpolyglot that provides comparative help for PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby.

2. There’s a new page about “Finding stuff on CPAN”.

3. There’s a page about Perl developer tools originally from the perl.net.au wiki.

4. A New Page about Reference Resources for Perl was added.

5. Part 5 of the “Perl for Newbies” tutorial was added.

6. A Page about the #perlcafe channel on Freenode was restored from the perl.net.au wiki.

7. There is a lot of other updates to the existing pages on the site, including many new items that were added to the “Perl Elements to Avoid” page which I feel is becoming a major highlight of the site.

9-July-2012: Perl Humour page, #perl FAQ, and other new pages

The last update on the news feed for The Perl Beginners’ site was almost a year ago. While the site continued to improve, I neglected writing a new entry until now, so I hope this one will compensate for that.

So without further ado, here is what is new:

1. We now have a page about Perl Humour, which was restored from a page in the now offline perl.net.au wiki.

2. Also originally from that wiki is the Freenode’s #perl channel Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) List, which is well worth a read.

3. Another restored page is the list of CPAN Wrappers for Distributions.

4. We added a page about web automation in Perl, and one about manipulating files and directories.

5. The Perl on Windows page was enhanced with new links to Strawberry Perl and DWIM Perl.

6. We have a new page about Perl Training Providers, which currently only contains a link to the Perl Training Directory.

7. The “Perl Elements to Avoid” page contains many new entries.

8. Our mirror of the book Modern Perl by chromatic was updated to its latest edition.

We hope you find these additions useful or enlightening.

1. The book Modern Perl is now recommended, and a local copy of it, under the CC-by-nc-sa licence is available on Perl-Begin, thanks to chromatic.

2. We added a Page with links to exercises and challenges.

3. There's a new topical page about Modules and Packages.

4. A page about using Perl for writing Chat robots and scripts (IRC, Jabber, etc.) has been added. We also added a page about developing games with Perl.

5. More non-recommended Perl elements have been added to “Perl Elements to Avoid” page.

6. The web-development with Perl page was enhanced with new frameworks and information.

7. Added a list of GUI debuggers to the IDEs and tools page.

8. We're now mirroring the now offline “Life with CPAN” by Jeremy Mates.

9. A page about the differences between “Perl”, “perl” and “PERL” was added. It was inspired by a similar page on the Israeli Perl Mongers site.

10. Many anchors were added to the pages using id= attributes.

11. We're now maintaining the sources of the Perl Beginners' Site in a bitbucket.org repository and there are instructions for contributing in the link.

• We've added a comprehensive and growing "Perl Elements to Avoid" page with many Perl paradigms that you should know better than to incorporate into your code.

• "Impatient Perl" was updated to the latest version.

• There's a new topical page about SSH and Telnet.

• There's a new topical page about optimising and profiling Perl code, in order to make it run faster.

• There's a new page "What about Perl 6?".

• The page about text generation was greatly enhanced.

• The how-to contribute to the site section now includes the TODO and DONE files, which previously only existed in the Subversion repository.

• The headers at the top of the page were styled better after applying some input from "tm604".

• There are many other small improvements to the site both user-visible ones and ones that were done to its internals.

• A page containing a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) was added.
• A page about text parsing and a page about text generation, both with best practices and recommended technologies were added.
• Added a page about scoping and variables.

Aside from that, the ShareThis button was replaced by the AddToAny button which does not require JavaScript, loads faster and does not load Google Analytics.

We added a a page about using Perl for E-mail processing, a page about Perl for multitasking and networking, a some topical pages:

• Date and Time.
• References in Perl.
• Regular Expressions.
• Hashes.

The IDEs and Tools page now contains screenshots.

Many new links have been added and many typos have been corrected. Enjoy!

I thought the Perl Beginners' Site was perfect after the last update, but boy I was wrong. A quick review and critique of the site by a certain prominent Perl developer proved me wrong, and afterwards I had more stuff that I found lacking. So here's what has changed.

We're now mirroring the public domain "Perl for Newbies" tutorial as well as the GFDLed book "Impatient Perl" by Greg London. Their presence on the site was done in order to preserve Perl-Begin's common look and feel, and to make sure people would be able to access them without having to go to a different site, which may be blocked by over-zealous web-filters. We hope to mirror other freely distributable material that may prove useful to beginners on Perl-Begin in the future.

The "call-for-action" notice at the beginning was changed to "Learn Perl Now!" and now appears on all the pages.

We also fixed several look and style glitches.

There are also several corrections to text and links.

Stack Overflow was added to the web-forums page.

There are now mentionings of two new topical books - "Perl & LWP" and "Programming the Perl DBI".

Finally, the "About this site" page was updated and made more modern.

We hope you enjoy the new site. If you like it, please recommend it to your friends - if you don't - let us know and we'll see what we can do.

After the last news item, a lot of work was invested into Perl-Begin.org, the Perl Beginners' Site, making it even better than it used to be. Here's a summary of the changes:

• A testimonials page was added, with some honest-to-God testimonial quotes which are now featured in the Testimonials side-bar.

• There's a new IDEs and tools page, featuring some Integrated Development Environments.

• There's a new page sporting links to collections of blogs.

• Several new topical pages were added:

  1. Perl and Databases
  2. GUI Development in Perl
  3. Perl for XML Processing
  4. Debugging
  5. Object-oriented Programming in Perl
  6. Using CPAN

• A ShareThis button was added to the bottom of every page for easy bookmarking and sharing.

• Many writing errors (spelling, grammar, syntax, phrasing, etc.) have been corrected by Alan Haggai Alavi. He seems to have a good eye for catching such problems, and I am indebted to him.

• Corrected several broken links including those to Ovid's CGI course.

We hope you enjoy the new Perl Beginners' Site and please recommend it to your friends. All content on Perl-Begin is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence which allows almost unlimited re-use.

Recently, the Perl-Begin site has seen many updates and corrections. Among them are:

• In the Perl on Windows page, we now recommend the open-source and community-headed Strawberry Perl instead of the proprietary and quirky ActivePerl.
• The contributors list is now in the global navigation menu. This makes sure it will be prominently featured on all pages of the site, and won't be left out-of-date.
• The systems administration page now contains links to many useful modules.
• Many new links have been added, both internal and external, and some broken links have been fixed.
• The licensing blurb at the bottom was clarified to be CC-by 2.0, or at your option a later version.

Aside from all that, we'd like to note that our attention has been directed to an effort on the Perl 5 Wiki to list all Perl-related mailing lists. This effort needs help, and there are instructions for that, at the link.

The contents of our wiki were integrated into the perl.net.au MediaWiki as its "New to Perl?" section. This was done to consolidate the Perl wiki'ing efforts, because there's much more action on perl.net.au than there was on our wiki, and for ease of maintenance. Our wiki will be removed soon.

Also of note is a new section of the site on Perl-related wikis.

There's a new site for Perl beginners called Perlmeme.org. It collects tutorials, howto documents, and frequently asked questions (FAQ) lists. I was referred to its developers by a mutual friend, and since then became heavily involved in its development. (E.g.: some of the material from my Perl for Perl Newbies series, was integrated there. )

Perlmeme.org tries to be as up-to-date as possible and is certainly worth checking out. On a different note, I'd like to mention that I went over the material in the Perl for Perl Newbies series and heavily updated and corrected it. It should be much better now.

-- Shlomi Fish.

The Wiki was heavily spammed and so was taken off. Now, a new wiki was set up with a better implementation - MediaWiki, and now we monitor the RSS feed and use other measurements to prevent Spam.

All the content of the old wiki was restored.

We now have a new Wiki with a better implementation. The previous wiki was dumped because it was a JavaScript hell and was quite lame in its conventions. The newer wiki implementation (PmWiki to be exact) is much better in this and other regards.

All the content from the old wiki was transferred to the new one. We hope you'd like it better.