Every new release of Perl comes with a big list of changes, plenty of which seem carefully worded to make the average Perl programmer wonder, “Wait, do I care about this? What the heck is the global interpreter phase?” Perl 5.14 is chocked full of great improvements will actually be useful in day to day programming, and this talk focuses on those, leaving the weird esoterica for another day.
Ricardo Signes was thrust into the job market with only a rudimentary humanities education, and was forced to learn to fend for himself. He is now a full-time Perl programmer, project lead on perl itself, and frequent contributor to the CPAN.