Customer Reviews

Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, Second Edition

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As you can imagine, this short book is only for the serious Perl guru. The first half of the book is on the Perl 6 language and is so terse that it's only readable by experienced Perl programmers. The second half of the book covers Parrot, the new Perl Virtual Machine. This is seriously hard core material, which is useful if you plan to write your own compiler to fit on top of the machine.

Doubtless this is some cutting edge and impressive material, but the book has no ramp for beginners. If your job depends on high-end Perl, you will want to read this book. If you are an average Perl user you can probably wait for the next version of Programming Perl.

Perl 5 is the current version of Perl out there in active use. But a cadre of key developers has been steadily tooling up a major upgrade, Perl 6. This book gives you a detailed preview that claims to be an accurate description of what it will be, when it is officially released. In part, of course, so that existing Perl users can plan for the future. But the book is also a call to arms. If you are enticed and intrigued by Perl 6, and would like to contribute to its development, then please do so! The authors show how to join the development team. An all-volunteer effort, mind you. They can't pay you anything.

Speaking of which, that brings up the second part of the book. As part of the Perl 6 effort, there is a related project, Parrot. It will be a language independent virtual machine that can convert Perl 6 source to a byte code binary. And also do likewise for Tcl, Python, Java and other languages.

Does this ring any bells? Sounds in the spirit of Microsoft's .NET. That was and is a massive task in design and implementation. No one outside Microsoft, and precious few inside, knows how much it is costing. What is impressive is that here in Parrot, we have a bunch of volunteers trying a similar effort, with no $budget to speak of. Can they do it? The authors strongly argue, "yes".

I found this book well written and enjoyable. As someone interested in how a team goes about developing a new language, parts of it read like a good NY Times feature. For anyone writing Perl professionally, this is a good heads-up on where their language is going. For introductory Perl users, esp those coming from another language, the Design Philosophy and quick language review sections are very useful for 'grokking' Perl at a high level and then seeing how the pieces fall into place.

If you are just curious about Perl 6 and Parrot, this is a good book. If you are planning on diving into the language and want to know some complex internals, this is a good book. In fact, either way you slice it, it is pretty darn good. The only caveat is that this is not a tutorial style book and probably does not completely cover the Perl 6 language. This of course is clearly stated in the book itself since this book was published before the release date of a perl implementation of Perl 6 was even decided upon.

But now that date looks like it is over the horizon. There is chatter on the wires that 'Rakudo Star' will be released in April-ish 2010. This most likely will be the first release of perl 6. The question then is; is this book relevant? And the answer is unequivocally yes. It gives you a lot of information on Perl 6 syntax and features and provides a pretty through overview of Parrot.

It is a densely packed book, a lot like K & R's book on C. But it is readable and usable even as reference. Well worth buying.