Since 2002 the Perl community has changed a lot, mostly towards better development practices.

A first (and of course incomplete) list of things to have a look at would be:

• Perl's Best Practices, for the current... best practices in Perl devlopment (and Perl::Critic to see how they can be checked automatically in your code),
• Devel::Cover to better test your code,
• Moose for the latest bestest OO system,
• CPANTS to see what a modern module (and by extension any code) is supposed to look like,

Pugs is dead, or to be optimistic, stalled. The lead developer is no longer actively hacking on the project, and the effort required to apprehend a large Haskell codebase has so far defied some of the best and brightest minds who have time to spend on it. So unless you're an accomplished Haskell programmer, I wouldn't recommend it.

If you want to get in touch with what's happening in Perl 6, I recommend having a look at Rakudo.

To get up to speed with Perl in general, I recommend you have a look at use.perl, perlbuzz and Planet Perl. That will give you a feeling for where the community is moving these days.

The hard way to learn the changes it to go through perld570delta, perl571delta, ... and read what changed. The much better approach is to pick a project and implement it in Perl.

Regarding Perl 6: The spec is quite solid at the moment, but the implementations are not finished. Pugs is the most advanced implementation, bad sadly abandoned. rakudo in the parrot repository is the rising star, but at the moment neither robust nor feature complete (but constantly improving).

It's certainly a nice language, but I'd still recommend Perl 5 for getting back to programming with Perl.

Some Perl 6 features are available today in Perl 5.10. Familiarising yourself with the new Perl 5.10 features should prove enjoyable:

• The Year in Perl, 2007
• Re: Why should I use perl 5.10?
• Perl 5.10 slide show by Perl 5.10 Pumpking Rafael
• Slide show: What is new in Perl 5.10?
• Perl 5.10 regexes
• Perl Training Australia Talks
• Four micro articles on new Perl 5.10 features
• A Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10
• Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10, Part 2

The CPAN has come a long way in the past five years, with many new supporting web sites springing up -- see, for example, the "Other supporting websites" section in the CPAN Wikipedia entry.

The Perl QA and Testing community has made great advances in the past five years. Noteworthy here are the fanatical CPAN Testers, the envy of every other programming language; and the improvements currently underway to the Test Anything Protocol (TAP). Some links:

• Perl QA Wiki
• Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook
• CPAN Testers
• CPAN Testers Statistics
• CPAN Dependencies
• CPAN Testing Service
• The CPAN Testers Wiki (thanks bingos)

Finally, since you mentioned the fun side of Perl, I wrote an overview of the lighter side of Perl culture, which may be of interest.

You forgot the CPAN Testers Wiki. >:)

PerlCritic is great (along with the PBP book mentioned by others). I run it through all my code now and it's dragging up the quality of my code all the time. (Perltidy is also handy to try and ensure the code is in some way standardised)

You might also want to look at http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?recommended_cpan_modules

Lance

I'm in the same boat here, I write perl scripts to take on specific problems, and try to do something new with each script. It's taking some time, however it's been worth it. And you are correct, I use perl because it's fun!

Plus, checking in on perlmonks and reading and voting has helped too!


tubaandy

Also have a look at Dave Cross Perl Teach-Ins especially made for people who want to get back into Perl.

• Magnum Solutions Limited: Perl Teach-In
• Perl Teach-In (part 1 on SlideShare
• Perl Teach-In (part 2) on SlideShare

Hope this helps.