Customer Reviews

Perl 6 Essentials

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"Perl 6 Essentials" is the first book (as far as I know) about the ongoing development of Perl 6. The authors of this book are part of the taem of volunteers that is developing the new version of Perl.

This book can be (roughly) subdivided into the following three subject areas:

- the project and design philosophy (chapters 1, 2, 3, pages 1-24)
- the new Perl 6 language, as far as it is defined by now (chapter 4, pages 25-69)
- the language independent runtime environment (Assembler language) Parrot (chapters 5-7, pages 70-186)

As the authors state in the foreword "Because Perl 6 is rapidly changing, we'll publish a revised edition of the book every year until Perl 6 is released", this is a book about a snapshot of the current development of Perl 6. I will definitely buy the new revision of this book every year to stay informed about the Perl 6 development (although I am working with computers for over 20 years by now, prefer books to online texts still). If you are interested in Perl 6 like I am, you might want to buy this book as well.

I enjoyed reading the first chapter about the Perl 6 project and the design philosophy and found it exciting and instructive. This chapter made me think about participating in the Perl 6 development (but unfortunately I will probably not find the time to do that). I hope that some more people will participate in the Perl 6 development after reading this book so that "parasites" like me will get Perl 6 earlier.

The Perl 6 language itself is not fully defined yet. What I read in chapter 4 about this new language, makes me hope that we will be able to start using it soon. I would have liked to have read a bit more about Perl 6.

The chapters about Parrot that make up the biggest part of this book, make me thing about the good old times with 6502 Assembler and I really think about writing some Parrot programs. Parrot is the "Virtual Machine" or CPU that will run Perl 6 and other languages. This are some interesting information about PASM (Parrot Assembler) in this book. Because Parrot is largely independent of Perl 6, a rather well understood subject and is needed as the basis for everything else, we can read most about this subject in "Perl 6 Essentials".

If you want to get an overview about the status of the Perl 6 development and you want to support the development of Perl 6 (in the form of royalties for the authors that are working in Perl 6), you should buy this book. However you will not be able to use Perl 6 after reading this book because it does not exist yet.

Great, no fluff overview of things to come. Code examples for pretty much everything covered. Even covers Parrot assembler if you want to dive in. Easy read at under 200 pages.

I have been following Perl 6 for some time and this book is a great overview of things to come. It gives well-written code examples. Not a huge book, which is good, as it contains no fluff; just straight-forward Perl 6 syntax with code.