I've been in kind of a writers block, for all kinds of reasons, personal and professional. I started to think about an article that I could write that would get my fingers typing. And I was thinking about how the answer to "where did this Ruby feature come from?" is often "Perl". And then I realized that Perl has vanished so completely that there's probably a large group of Ruby developers that don't know much about it.

### Book Status Beta 5 should be out early this week, featuring a mostly new chapter on testing legacy projects, and also updating the code setup and the initial walkthrough chapters to Rails 3. Over the next couple betas any remaining Rails 3 incompatibilities will also be fixed. ### Book...

Due to circumstances somewhat beyond my control, I find myself working in the largest Perl project I've ever done. Now, I'm not in the least interested in a "my language is better than your language" deal because a) this strikes me as very well covered territory, and b) it seems...