Merry Christmas Everybody!

This year marks the 18th year the Perl Advent Calendar has been published. Who'da thought all those years ago when I came up with a silly idea at a Perl Mongers' social event we'd still have interesting and exciting things to talk about eighteen years on?

But interesting things to cover we have! This year we've featured articles - in a rather joking fashion - on lots of core technologies that make Perl an ever better and improving language. We've talked about improvements to the core of Perl, Moose and it's vast array of extensions that can make your life easier, we've discussed Perl's amazing Unicode handling - one of the best languages out there for complicated handling - and we've covered tools to help you improve your programming from digging into your memory usage to validating your code with custom Perl Critic rules. We've even covered a bunch of handy little utility modules to allow you to create interactive terminal programs or quickly craft one liners that can grab and manipulate web pages and JSON data.

A lot has improved in the last eighteen years in Perl and every year I continue to learn new techniques and new tools that make my life easier and better.

So thanks to everyone that has been reading, and everyone who has written the modules, tools, and improvements to Perl that I get to talk about each year.

Happy Holidays!