Perl for System Administration is out for just over 2 years. So what? Nothing relevant to the book has changed since. Sure, 5.8 came out, but so what? The new things in 5.8 are mostly related to Unicode, threading and internals stuff. Hardly relevant for the sysadmin. Neither has Unix changed much in the last 2 years, we didn't just abandon processes or /etc.

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

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.