"Update" to app2ed

[Simon Cozens]

Hi folks,
    I'm writing an article for perl.com detailing some of the changes in Perl,
CPAN and programming practice in the past year or two since I wrote the second
edition of Advanced Perl Programming. However, I'm a bit aware that there's a
distinction between how *my* programming practice has changed and how Perl
programming in general has changed, and I don't want it to be just me raving
ex-cathedra again, so I'd like some advice about what I need to write about.
    To attempt to forestall the inevitable simian cavalcade,[1] I need to point
out a few things. First, this is aiming to be an article of at most 4000 words 
spread over each of the chapters in the book, and so I don't have time to
discuss every change in Perl and every new CPAN module in the last year. Just
the really important ones, and probably only one in each chapter. I especially
don't have time to describe your favourite new object/database abstraction. Or
energy. Or patience. Second, I've already covered a lot of stuff in the book,
so please don't suggest stuff I've already done. Finally, I am looking for
stuff that a lot of people are genuinely using.

    So, here are the chapters I'm "updating" and what I'm thinking about
saying so far:

    Advanced Perl Programming: I have no idea what to say here.

    Parsing: This has to be HTML::TreeBuilder and XML::TreeBuilder.

    Templating: Template Toolkit and Mason became standard, with TT leading by
a nose?

    Natural Language Processing: Maybe something about Yahoo's semantic
thingys?

    Unicode: Not much has happened here, has it?

    POE: Um, Term::Visual?

    Testing: ???

    Inline: Work on the NCI stuff?

    Fun: ???

Any thoughts would be appreciated, so long as they don't involve monkey poo.

[1] This trick never works.
-- 
diff: usage diff [whatever] etc.
    - plan9 has a bad day