Just when I thought there were no more good books to be written about the Perl programming language: Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway and Higher Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus are two recent must-have titles. I was playing with both of these in the store the other day, and couldn't put either of them down.

I was less impressed by Perls of Wisdom by Randal Schwartz, but mostly because it was stuff I had read before: It's a collection of previously published articles by Randall, and may be useful to many everyday Perl programmers that haven't spent the last few years knee deep in Perl advice. The collection is not as good as his truly exceptional books, Learning Perl and Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules.

Now is just the right time for these books: Perl is mainstream, widespread, and used for many heavy-duty applications. These books condense years of computer science and real world experience with the Perl language into essential reading for the next generation of Perl programming. It'd be nice if the language itself would get around to its next generation as well, but there's much that can be done with the tools that we have.