Modern Perl: The Book and Using Perl 6 with Rakudo Star

Q3 2010 is a good time for Perl books. Modern Perl: The Book is almost ready to go to the printer. Using Perl 6 is nearing completion as well. If you're interested in understanding Perl 5 or Perl 6, I'm happy to recommend both books to you.

(I also heartily recommend Effective Perl Programming 2E. I haven't finished reading it yet, but what I've read has been very good.)

You can help make these books even better. I've gone through hundreds of comments on the Modern Perl draft book, and the text is much better for it. Thank you to everyone who's contributed. I'd love to get more comments, especially on later chapters (regular expressions, objects, style) from anyone intersted in Perl, whether the freshest novice or Larry's brother in law (Perl user #1). The easiest way for me to take comments is if you fork the Modern Perl Book Github repository and send me a pull request, but you can file issues there or mail me directly if you prefer.

Using Perl 6 has a different need for feedback. In one sense, the book helps the design of Perl 6 the language. No one is really an expert in the language yet, so we all approach it from a novice or experienced novice perspective. You don't have to be a Perl 5 adept to understand the book, however: we want to explain Perl 6 on its own terms. What makes sense? What doesn't? What do you want to do that the book doesn't explain?

We'll keep updating both books even after we publish paper versions, and we'll keep updating electronic versions, and certainly we'll happily revise the paper versions—but the more feedback we get in the next two weeks, the better the books will be for people who aren't as well connected in the Perl world as you are. (You're reading this; you're way ahead of a lot of people we'd like very much to reach.)

Thanks for all of your help. It's a good time to be programming Perl again.