“The Internet was Built on O’Reilly Books”

In my last post, Tim O’Reilly, Programming Perl, and EconTalk, I didn’t mention the other bit I found interesting in Tim’s answers to Russ Robert’s questions. He mentioned a Publishers Weekly cover that featured a stack of O’Reilly books with the tag “The Internet was Built on O’Reilly Books”.

I couldn’t track down the cover through regular googling, but I sent a note to Tim complimenting him on the nice interview and asking if he knew the issue. He put Edie Freedman on the job. If you’re a Perl trivia master, you know Edie is responsible for the animals covers and specifically the Programming perl cover. She tracked down the cover from February 21, 2000:

Continue reading ““The Internet was Built on O’Reilly Books””

Update your Programming Perl ebook!

If you bought the e-book version of Programming Perl, 4th Edition, you should be able to get the updated copy of it. In that, we fix various typos and thought errors reported through the errata system. And, we refresh the bits so all those stale 1s and 0s are replaced with new ones.


You can register your paper copy of any O’Reilly book to get a discount on the e-version. Better than that, you can connect your Dropbox account (referral link) to allow O’Reilly to automatically sync your purchases and updates.

pack’s C0 and U0

Perl’s unpack can work with character data in two ways. The C template does characters and the U does the UTF-8. That they exist doesn’t mean that you should use them, but they exist and I inadvertently overlooked some of their behavior for Programming Perl. These focus a bit too much on Perl’s internal representation of a string, which we shouldn’t do. Continue reading “pack’s C0 and U0”

Programming Perl in popular culture

While watching Brooklyn 99, the new Andy Samberg show, I notice in the background of the police psychologist’s office a curious blue-spined book. The trade dress of O’Reilly books makes them instantly identifiable from a distance, even when blurry (which means the branding people got it right). I had to look at it on pause for a few seconds to convince myself I wasn’t seeing things. Continue reading “Programming Perl in popular culture”

Win a framed cover of Programming Perl

A framed cover of Programming Perl showed up in my mail today. Our publisher, O’Reilly Media, has been doling these out to authors in the past couple of months. Tom got one about a week ago and I was slightly jealous, even though I already have one for Learning Perl. So what am I going to do with this one? I’ve signed the front glass, not wanting to disturb the very nice framing job, which also means that if you hate my signature, a little rubbing alcohol should remove that easily. Continue reading “Win a framed cover of Programming Perl”