I have C books that are around 20 years old and are still current for learning the language. Just because a book is old doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile.

However, I do agree that Java (and VB) take up far too much space on the shelves. I also agree that the use of CGI in the book title has started to be seen as a bad thing. Too many CGI application written in Perl have had bad press simply because of bad experiences from several years ago. Perl has been getting a facelift in recent times and some of the really good books (such as Perl & XML, Perl for Bioinformatics and even Perl for System Administration) will hopefully make people more aware that there is more to Perl than CGI.

But how do we change this? One way is to write lots of reviews for the Perl books you have and add them to various sites to give them a bit more notoriety.

Also if you are asking for a particular book and $bookstore doesn't have it in stock, ask them to do a look up to see how much it is and when it would be available. Some stores record look ups to see what people are requesting. If a book is getting more requests, but it's always out of stock, very quickly you are likely to find in back on the shelves.

At the end of the day, it's all about promotion.

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Barbie
Birmingham Perl Mongers
Web Site: http://birmingham.pm.org/
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Sure, the quality of the book isn't very high (just like many other O'Reilly books), but I don't expect a second edition suddenly would.

Books like "The Art of Computer Programming" and "Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment" were written before most (all?) Perl books. And they are more useful for a programmer (even a Perl programmer) than all "Perl" books combined.

The quality of good books doesn't decay over time.

Abigail