What's a good book about programming for Unix? In Learning Perl, while showing the file test operators, we say:

Don't worry if you don't know what some of the other file tests mean--if you've never heard of them, you won't be needing them. But if you're curious, get a good book about programming for Unix.

But, we then leave the reader hanging without giving them an idea which book they might. I guess Chapter 4 of Stevens's Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment might be the answer, but is there something else?

Sinan Ünür created a first pass at a Perl interface to sharktools so you can have all the fun of Wireshark right in your Perl program. Why should Java and Python have all of the fun while analyzing network traffic?

I'm paying him to do it because I need it for a project and he's much better than I am at that sort of thing. However, I bet a lot of other Perl people would find it useful, so we're making it open source. Sinan already set up the github repository, and eventually that will make its way to CPAN as Net::Sharktools unde…

How have you set up your environment to work with Unicode? I want to make a cheat sheet for the Perl newbies. There is some information in the googlesphere but it's disperse and unfocused.

I'm working Unicode into the next edition of Learning Perl. The most frustrating part of this for newbies (Perl, Unicode, or otherwise) is getting all the pieces to cooperate. Even if you get it right inside your Perl program, your terminal might not handle Unicode. If your terminal handles it, you might not have the right fonts. And so on and so on.

These are the things that are likely to happen:

1. A new cpan(1) (the thing from App::cpan and also bundled with CPAN.pm) version for Perl 5.14. I need to get on that pretty soon, then. :) The current cpan(1) has support for loading alternate config files, and I'd like to also provide a config option that acts as much as possible like cpanm. I think that's probably 90% possible, even if we have to convince CPAN.pm to do things slightly separately.