turncoat

[Peter Corlett]

With the dearth of any interesting Perl jobs out there, I'm thinking  
that I should probably retrain in something that people are actually  
hiring for. A quick poke around Jobserve indicates that Java jobs pay  
enough coin that I can afford to take loads of time off to hack on  
interesting Perl stuff.

The main downside is that my Java knowledge is basically stuck in  
1998. I know the core language, have written web applets, mobile  
phone applications, daemons, but it's all Java 1.1 style. I hear  
they've added one or two new features to Java since :)

So... I'm going to wander into Foyles to stock up on books to get me  
back up to speed. Assume I'm
a competent Perl 5 and Java 1.1 developer. Which books come  
recommended to drag me kicking and screaming into the 21st century?

Should I be looking at Struts, or something else? Swing looks useful  
(or at least seems to suck less hard than AWT), is it? Where did they  
hide LWP[0]? XML::Simple? Data::Dumper? WWW::Mechanize? etc..?


[0] I lie, I actually know this one.