Apress recently published Beginning Perl (retread of the WROX book) and Perls of Wisdom (collection of Randal's columns). They published the new books Pro Perl and Perl 6 Now. They have the upcoming books Pro Perl Debugging and Pro Perl Parsing, which I haven't seen yet (and they usually send me an early peek of the galleys on CD). So, that's 2 retreads, 2 new books, and 2 upcoming books.

During the same time, O'Reilly has coming up Learning Perl, 4th Ed., Intermediate Perl (the new name for the Alpaca), and Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Ed. (an almost complete rewrite). They have two new books coming up: Perl Best Practices and Perl Testing Developer's Notebook. So, that's 3 retreads and 2 upcoming books.

The numbers aren't the story though. You have to look at who is publishing what. The important books out of all of those are, in my opinion, Advanced Perl Programming (it's an excellent book based on the sources Simon sent me), Perl Best Practices (again, excellent based on the source Damian sent me), and Perl Testers Developer Notebook. Those last two are new and important subjects on the Perl bookshelf. O'Reilly also has some other interesting things in the works.

It's not a writer thing either: O'Reilly has contracts with Simon Cozens, Randal Schwartz, chromatic, Damian Conway, and the other top, prolific Perl authors. Apress has been using lesser known or first time authors. It seems to me O'Reilly is attracting the talent. They still seem on top of the pack. They still have the best-selling Perl books.

The difference is that O'Reilly isn't the only serious player. Manning used to be a Perl competitor (that's who published Damian's first book and Simon's second book), but they stop publishing Perl titles years ago and their authors didn't stick with them. Apress has a better chance, I think, and they're going to keep at it and get better.