Perl Debugger Pocket Reference -- Most Perl programmers know about the Perl debugger, but not many take the time to master it. This little book provides a quick and convenient path to mastery of the Perl debugger. Written by a core member of the Perl debugger development team, it's an ideal quick reference to the debugger commands that let you examine your source code, set breakpoints, dump out function call stacks, change values of variables, and more. A sample excerpt, Before You Debug, A Debugger Tutorial, and More, is available free online.

Apocalypse 12 -- Larry Wall writes, "Some people will be surprised to hear it, but Perl is a minimalist language at heart." Here he explains how objects and classes are supposed to work in Perl 6. Join Larry and Damian Conway this July in Portland for their OSCON session on Perl 6.

SafariU: Create, Customize, and Share Teaching Material -- Looking for a way to truly customize your course textbook and offer students exactly the material you choose to teach, while saving them a good bit of money? Become a SafariU beta tester and check out the new web-based publishing platform from O'Reilly that allows you to create custom textbooks and online syllabi. To see SafariU in action, register to join SafariU's developers for a live webcast.

Building a Parrot Compiler -- The virtual machine for Perl 6 is not just for Perl 6 anymore. Parrot is a high-level, high-performance target for all sorts of languages. Dan Sugalski, coauthor of Perl 6 Essentials, demonstrates by building a compiler for a vintage 4GL. Dan and his coauthor, Allison Randal, are both speaking at July's Open Source Convention.

Your O'Reilly Account: New, Single Sign On -- O'Reilly customers and guests now have a single address and one password to access all things O'Reilly, from oreilly.com and Safari Bookshelf to all of the O'Reilly Network sites and DevCenters. When possible, we've consolidated your prior, separate accounts into one new account. Logging into the new system is quick and easy; details on how to do it have been emailed to you, and you can read more about O'Reilly's single sign on in Tony Stubblebine's weblog.

Exegesis 7 for Perl 6 -- At first glance, Perl 6 may seem like something of a backwards step--it has extra quotation marks and commas that Perl 5 didn't require. But the new formatting interface does have several distinct advantages. Damian Conway explains. Get all of O'Reilly's Perl books and articles at perl.oreilly.com.

A Horse Is a Horse, of Course, of Course--Or Is It? Perl classes and subroutines can get your horses to neigh, but you'll need to establish an instance and instance variables to distinguish between the Palomino and the Clydesdale. Find out how in Chapter 9 of Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules, the book that picks up where Learning Perl leaves off. If you like this chapter, read the whole book (and up to nine others) on Safari with a free trial subscription.

Safari Gets Bigger and Better -- There are now more than 2,000 books from the industry's leading technical publishers available on Safari Bookshelf. As the library grows, so does its functionality: searches are powerfully precise and as broad or specific as you wish; and now, with a Safari Max subscription, you can download chapters to read offline. Safari will help you save time, reduce errors, keep current, and save more money than ever with up to 35% off print copies of your favorite books. If you haven't yet gone on Safari, try a free trial subscription.

How We Wrote the Template Toolkit Book -- There are a number of tools available for writing books. Authors Dave Cross, Darren Chamberlain, and Andy Wardley are all Perl hackers, so when they got together to write a book, it didn't take them long to agree to use POD (Plain Old Documentation). Here's how they practiced what they preached with Perl Template Toolkit.

O'Reilly Partners with No Starch, Paraglyph, and Syngress -- We're pleased to announce a collaboration between like-minded companies: As of January 1, 2004, O'Reilly is the North American distributor for three innovative small presses: No Starch Press, Paraglyph Press, and Syngress Publishing. O'Reilly will handle retail and direct sales, warehousing, and shipping, as well as provide direct marketing and PR support for these publishers with whom our philosophies are aligned. We invite you to give them a close look.

Spidering Hacks -- Want to save time as well as extra trips to your favorite web sites? Here are two hacks--the first on using Template::Extract, a Perl module that allows you to scrape a web page to generate RSS feeds; and the second on using a program called dailystrips to grab all your favorite online comic strips in one HTML file--excerpted from the recently released Spidering Hacks.

One Hump or Two? If Perl is your cup of tea, O'Reilly's T-shirt featuring the Perl camel can be your sugar cube. Add some O'Reilly coasters and mugs, and you've got the ingredients for a whole tea party. Find the makings at ThinkGeek.

A Chromosome at a Time with Perl, Part 2 -- In the conclusion to his two-part series on using Perl in the bioinformatics realm, James Tisdall shows how references can speed up a subroutine call, how to bypass the overhead of subroutine calls entirely, and how to quantify the behavior of your code. James is the author of Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics.

A Chromosome at a Time with Perl -- James Tisdall offers a handful of tricks that will enable Perl programmers to write performance-efficient code for dealing with large amounts of biological sequence data. James is the author of the upcoming Mastering Perl for Bioinformatics.

Cooking with Perl -- Learn how to use SQL without a database server and how to send attachments in mail, in the latest sample recipes from O'Reilly's recently released Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition.