Reading the original edition of the book several years ago was a real eye opener for me. I learned how to modify the symbol table and use all those things Damian has lately been telling us not to.

The core of that information is still in the second edition, but there's also a lot of CPAN touring (as previous posters have noted). I have the second edition on my desk and am about half way through.

If you are interested in things like how to use POE or which templating system is right for your way of thinking, this might be worth buying. If you are expecting to see even cooler magic, skip it. The magic hasn't really changed and the new book focuses on it less.

I'm not sorry I bought the new book. In the face of Damian's admonishment to behave myself and act like a professional, it is a nice counter point of playground fun (at least the first chapter is). It's just that fun which I like so much about Perl, even when I'm not using it. Further, it makes a lot of really cool CPAN modules possible. <shameless_self_promotion>I've used it to make Java::Swing, Perl bindings for swing. Very Perlish and I think quite cool</shameless_self_promotion> After the magic, there are things I need to learn, like POE and unicode.

You have to make your own choice. Simon is a good writer, who is not afraid of offending Damian's advice. There is cool stuff in there, and the content is quite different in focus, if not in character.

Phil