Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using files and strings in modern Perl.

Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using modern Perl productively.

Amazon's Simple Storage Service provides a simple, flexible, and inexpensive way to manage online data storage. Amazon's S3 modules for Perl make storing and retrieving data in your own programs almost trivial, leaving Amazon to worry about hosting, scaling, and backups. Abel Lin shows how to store, retrieve, and store data with Amazon S3.

Many programmers know of the two main systems of templating. One embeds actual source code into the template. The other provides a mini language with loops, conditionals, and other control structures. There is a third way -- a reverse callback system. James Robson explains this best-of-both-worlds approach by demonstrating Perl's Template::Recall module.

Some data is private. Other data, less so. Secure applications make it possible--and easy--to keep user data visible to the right people and invisible to the wrong people. Vladi Belperchinov explains how access control works and demonstrates with working code suitable for implementing your own access controls.

Have you done something stunningly cool or staggeringly useful with Perl in the past year? Conference season will be here soon; it's time to consider giving a talk to your local monger group, a regional conference, or even OSCON. Perl track committee member brian d foy gives several guidelines to help you decide what to talk about and how to present it.

The Perl community just celebrated the 20th anniversary of Perl. Here are some stories from Perl hackers around the world about problems they've solved and memories they've made with the venerable, powerful, and still vital language.

Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion describes the state of Perl, the language and the community. In his 11th address, he discussed the past, present, and future of scripting languages, including the several dimensions of design decisions important to the development of Perl 6.

Adobe's PDF is a well-established format for transferring pixel-perfect documents. It's not nearly as malleable as plain text, but several CPAN modules make creating, manipulating, and reusing PDFs much easier. Detlef Groth demonstrates how to use PDF::Reuse.

Perl programs are easy to write, especially if they solve simple problems. If you find yourself re-using the same programs (or worse, the same code), it's time to bundle your code into pieces easier to reuse. It's time to turn programs into modules. Andy Sylvester walks through the three steps of making a simple, standalone Perl program into a robust, tested, distributable, and reusable piece of code.

Many useful programs take arguments and configuration options. It's easy to add one or two, but as your program grows, the difficulty of allowing configuration concisely and intelligently also grows. Jon Allen demonstrates how to unify argument and configuration processing in a way that lets you write good code and your users get on with their work.

Perl 5's reference counting scheme almost always keeps memory usage predictable...except for one corner case. The Resource Acquisition Is Initialization strategy helps avoid memory leaks--and can improve your use of exceptions, alarms, other resources, and even transactional systems. Igor Gariev demonstrates.

Perl 6 will soon be here, and to Perl 5 programmers it will feel very different yet very much the same. Perl 6 will enable programmers to be more expressive by giving them more tools to work with (making easy things easy) and allowing them to be more precise in their expressions. Jonathan Scott Duff demonstrates how everyday Perl tasks remain easy but become clearer and more powerful in Perl 6 code that you can run today.

Perl lightning articles offer short takes on important subjects. See how Perl can outperform C for 3D programming, how (and why) to express cross-cutting concerns in your programs, and one way of keeping your test counts up-to-date.

Perl 6 isn't quite out yet, but you can learn and play with it today in various incarnations. One of the most compelling new features is a revamped and revised mechanism of parameter passing. Phil Crow demonstrates how powerful it is, and how you can gradually adopt more and more powerful constructs.