Modern Perl is one way to describe the way the world's most
effective Perl 5 programmers work. They use language idioms.
They take advantage of the CPAN. They show good taste and craft
to write powerful, maintainable, scalable, concise, and
effective code. You can learn these skills too! Perl first
appeared in 1987 as a simple tool for system administration.
Though it began by declaring and occupying a comfortable niche
between shell scripting and C programming, it has become a
powerful, general-purpose language family. Perl 5 has a solid
history of pragmatism and a bright future of polish and
enhancement Perl 6 is a reinvention of programming based on the
solid principles of Perl, but it's a subject of another book..
Over Perl's long history—especially the 17 years of Perl 5—our
understanding of what makes great Perl programs has changed.
While you can write productive programs which never take
advantage of all the language has to offer, the global Perl
community has invented, borrowed, enhanced, and polishe