Alistair G. Crooks summarizes and highlights some of the changes made to files in the NetBSD packages collection during the month of February. Posted at BSD Today.

Professional Perl Programming brings you the expertise of
professional programmers, taking a problem solving approach
to help you gain the knowledge you need. Perl is one of the most important scripting languages in use today. Open source, freely available, portable, versatile, and robust, powerful and easy to use, Perl is the first choice for thousands of professional web developers. But Perl is far more than a scripting language for the web. Supported by a comprehensive standard library and hundreds of third-party libraries, Perl is an increasingly popular choice for application programming.
“There are Unix shells that are now almost as capable as Perl, but they don’t have the same range of library support and nothing like CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) to encourage them. Technically, there is no reason why they might not have grown to challenge Perl as the scripting language of choice, but since they were traditionally thought of as “for scripts only”, they never did. In this respect the defining moment for Perl was the introduction of proper support for modules and packages (and as a side-effect, objects) in Perl 5, which took it from being a better kind of shell script to a language that supported and encouraged the use of libraries. So, Perl is well suited for real-world applications – and if you don’t believe me, just list the modules available on CPAN (www.cpan.org).” says Peter Wainwright the main author of this title. You can see a full interview with Peter Wainwright on www.wrox.com.

Both aspiring and experienced Perl programmers will benefit from the expertise in this book, whether they are looking to develop serious applications, improve their productivity, or simply learn a more powerful and portable replacement for shell scripts. Whatever the task at hand, this book will be an invaluable, detailed resource.

Topics covered include:

In-depth coverage of Perl 5.6

Regular expression matching, text processing, and interactive text applications

Working with filehandles, filenames, and directories

Debugging and profiling

Using, manipulating, and creating modules and packages

Object oriented programming

Processes, interprocess communication, and threads

Network client and server programming

Unicode, locale, and internationalization

Portable Perl, Perl internals, and integrating Perl and C
Book overview

The latest version of the language, Perl 5.6, is used throughout, with commentary for those with earlier versions.

For media review copies contact media@wrox.com.

Professional Perl Programming
Peter Wainwright, Aldo Calpini, Arthur Corliss, Simon Cozens, JJ Merelo-Guervos, Aalhad Saraf, Chris Nandor
March 2001
1-861004-49-4
Pages 1246
March 2001
$59.99/£45.99

From ZDNet eWEEK: “Cisco Systems Inc. officials said Thursday there is a vulnerability in all of the 11.x and 12.x versions of its Internetworking Operating System software that could allow an attacker to intercept and modify TCP traffic going to and from routers and switches running the IOS software.”

Anonymous Reader writes “This document outlines the kernel security improvements that have been made in the 2.4 kernel. A
number of significant improvements including cryptography and access control make 2.4 a serious
contender for secure corporate environments as well as private virtual networking.”

From CNN: VeriSign and ICANN have amended an agreement made two years ago that would have ended VeriSign’s control of the .com and .net top level domains by 2004. Now, the once-exclusive registrar has to relinquish that control no later than 2007. Well, sort of: ICANN will also allow VeriSign to continue its management the .com domain after the agreement expires in 2007.

IBM Japan announced that it will distribute a software development kit for ViaVoice Macintosh. The kit will be available by mail or for free download from IBM’s site after March 23. Story at ZDNet.

“Who has more juice at Hewlett-Packard? Bruce Perens or the Microsoft
quislings? It’s time to find out. HP just discontinued its proprietary
mail and calendaring server, OpenMail, which was the only non-Microsoft
server compatible with Microsoft Outlook’s popular calendar features.” Read the column at Linux Journal.

InfoWorld reports that Intel is talking about it’s plans for P2P, including ripping on Sun’s plans for Jxta, which will be released under the Open Source Apache license.

LinuxWorld.com has a review of Evolution 0.8, the Gnome email program that’s supposed to be similiar to Microsoft Outlook. Since 0.2, “the biggest difference is that I can now use Evolution in my everyday life. It still crashes and you should still back up your mail folders, but I’m using it now for two POP accounts, calendering, and contact information.”

DaemonNews.org has a story on setting up a firewall with FreeBSD. It starts with knowing what you want the firewall to do, which isn’t as obvious as you might think.