Acknowledgments
From Randal. In the preface of the first edition of Learning Perl, I acknowledged the
Beaverton McMenamin's Cedar Hills Pub
[*]
just down the street from my house for the
"rent-free booth-office space" while I wrote most of the draft on my Powerbook 140. Well, like
wearing your lucky socks every day when your favorite team is in the play-offs, I wrote nearly
all of this book (including these words) at the same brewpub, in hopes that the light of
success of the first book will shine on me twice. (As I update this preface for the second
edition, I can see that my lucky socks do indeed work!)
[*]
http://w w w .mcmenamins.com/
This McM's has the same great local microbrew beer and greasy sandwiches, but they've
gotten rid of my favorite pizza bread, replacing it with new items like marionberry cobbler (a
local treat) and spicy jambalaya. (And they added two booths and put in some pool tables.)
Also, instead of the Powerbook 140, I'm using a Titanium Powerbook, with 1,000 times more
disk, 500 times more memory, and a 200-times-faster CPU running a real Unix-based operating
system (OS X) instead of the limited Mac OS. I also uploaded all of the draft sections
(including this one) over my 144K cell-phone modem and emailed them directly to the
reviewers, instead of having to wait to rush home to my 9600-baud external modem and
phone line. How times have changed!
So, thanks once again to the staff of the McMenamin's Cedar Hills Pub for the booth space
and hospitality.
Like the fourth edition of Learning Perl, I also owe much of what I'm saying here and how I'm
saying it to the students of Stonehenge Consulting Services, who have given me immediate,
precise feedback (by their glazed eyes and awkwardly constructed questions) when I was
exceeding the "huh?" factor threshold. With that feedback over many dozens of presentations,
I was able to keep refining and refactoring the materials that paved the way for this book.
Speaking of which, those materials started as a half-day "What's new in Perl 5?" summary
commissioned by Margie Levine of Silicon Graphics, in addition to my frequently presented
on-site, four-day Llama course (targeted primarily for Perl Version 4 at the time). Eventually, I
got the idea to beef up those notes into a full course and enlisted fellow Stonehenge
presenter Joseph Hall for the task. (He's the one who selected the universe from which the
examples are drawn.) Joseph developed a two-day course for Stonehenge in parallel with his
excellent Effective Perl Programming book, which we then used as the course textbook (until
now).
Other Stonehenge instructors have also dabbled a bit in the "Packages, References, Objects,
and Modules" course over the years, including Chip Salzenberg and Tad McClellan. But the bulk
of the recent changes have been the responsibility of my senior trainer, Tom Phoenix, who has
been "Stonehenge employee of the month" so often that I may have to finally give up my
preferred parking space. Tom manages the materials (just as Tad manages operations) so I
can focus on being the president and the janitor of Stonehenge.
Tom Phoenix contributed most exercises in this book and a timely set of review notes during
my writing process, including entire paragraphs for me to just insert in place of the drivel I had
written. We work well as a team, both in the classroom and in our joint writing efforts. It is for
this effort that we've acknowledged Tom as a coauthor, but I'll take direct blame for any
parts of the book you end up hating: none of that could have possibly been Tom's fault.
And last but not least, a special thanks to my business partner, brian d foy, who herded this
book into its second revision and wrote most of the changes between the previous edition and
this edition.
Of course, a book is nothing without a subject and a distribution channel, and for that I must