Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5 (Expert's Voice in Open Source) [Paperback]

Scott Walters (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 16, 2004 | ISBN-10: 1590593952 | ISBN-13: 978-1590593950 | Edition: 1

Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5 is perfect for those eager to see where Perl is headed, Perl 5 programmers who want to know that their favorite tricks will still work in some form, and programmers wishing to open their minds to advanced programming topics.

Perl 6 generalizes the language, making it more extensible, eliminating longstanding pitfalls, and adding new concepts. Thanks to some clever people and impressive efforts, many of these new features work in Perl 5, so you can start using them now in production-level code.

The book teaches the basics from a Perl 6 perspective, touching on variable interpolation, datastructure use, object construction, threads, closures, symbol tables, and other core features. It then introduces continuations, coroutines, binding (or aliases), hyper operators that work on lists of data at once, set operators that work on complex datatypes, lightweight multidimensional arrays, strong type checking, autoboxing, precompilation, automatic module dependency installation, and more.

Though Perl 6 changes the fundamental syntax in some areas, Perl 5 code isn't left in the lurch. Thanks to PONIE, code from both versions may coexist in a single program. You’ll need to adjust only a few habits and learn a few new things, and this early adopters guide will help you do these things.

Table of Contents

1. The Programmer’s Introduction to the Perl Computer Programming Language
2. Perl 6 Road Map
3. Stricture by Default
4. Text, Numbers, and Other Constant Data
5. Names, Containers, and Values
6. Operators
7. Multidimensional Arrays
8. Data Structures
9. Switch
10. Block Structure
11. Subroutines
12. CPAN Modules
13. Objects
14. Exceptions
15. Type Safety
16. Multithreading
17. Any and All
18. Lexical Closures
19. Continuations
20. Coroutines

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Scott Walters has been programming computers since 1984 (professionally since 1996). He built the corporate intranet at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, and did pretty much everything for two startups. For fun, he runs http://perldesignpatterns.com, does CGI scripting for the NetBSD Project and http://projects.netbsd.org, maintains several CPAN modules, and helps coordinate Perl Mongers meetings for Phoenix Perl Mongers.

Product Details

• Paperback: 424 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (December 16, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590593952
• ISBN-13: 978-1590593950
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,437,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Trivia and notes from the author, February 7, 2005

By 

Scott D. Walters (Phoenix, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5 (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

Hi everyone!

Here's some trivia you might not otherwise find, and then I'm going to try to clear up exactly what this book *is*.

25% of the royalties on sales of this title have been pledged to the Electronic Frountier Foundation and The Perl Foundation. These two organizations have shaped the world for the better for those of us who love to express ourselves creatively using computers and the 'Net. Being a hacker wouldn't be the same without cryptography or Perl.

http://perl6now.com has a sample chapter, Multidimensional Arrays, which talks about PDL, the Perl Data Language, and doing vectorized operations on light weight, storage efficient large arrays. It also has all of the frontmatter including the Introduction and detailed Table of Contents. The Introduction is the best explanation of the book. There's also a link to my blog and other goodies.

Perl steals madly from other languagers (and always has); Perl 6 stole the coolest batch of features yet; _Perl 6 Now_ introduces these bizarre, alien, potent ideas using Perl 5 CPAN implementations and nearly 800 code listings.

First, it's a decidedly a Perl 5 book. It's about language features recently introduced in Perl 5, language features implemented as CPAN modules that intentionally or coincidentally parallel Perl 6's new features, and it's about advanced use of Perl 5's features to do things that Perl 6 tries to streamline or generalize to put into common reach. Perl 6's syntax will make learning Perl easier for novices but learning a new syntax just plain isn't that interesting to most of us. There are Perl 6 syntax examples but these are secondary to the introduction of the idea that spurred the change. Every idea included has a Perl 5 implementation. There is no hand-waving. Everything works in Perl 5 and everything is relavent to Perl 5. Making so many of Perl 6's ideas work on Perl 5 is no small task - this book contains hundreds of hacks, module demonstrations, tricks, and so on. This isn't a book on Parrot and it's not a book on PONIE (yet, though hopefully a second edition will do better). It only teaches how to incorporate the best parts of most of the languages on Earth to write some seriously mental Perl. If you enjoyed _Object Oriented Perl_, this book is for you.

-scott

P.S.: I wish I could blog here without rating the book, but I can't. Sorry.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I was not looking forward to Perl 6, December 30, 2004

By 

Anthony Lawrence "Unix, Linux and Mac OS X" (Middleboro, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5 (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

I'm a Perl dabbler. I use Perl frequently, but my code is generally clumsy and lacking in elegance. It does the job I need done, but people like Larry Wall usually go way over my head when they talk about how to do things.

That's why I've been more than a bit nervous about Perl 6 (it doesn't help when Larry throws around words like 'Apocalypse'). I felt, well, threatened.

Scott Walters book took me by the hand and gently showed me that I have little to fear and a lot to gain. I had read Larry Wall's explanation of Parrot and Ponie and had left still confused; Scott helped me understand it.

I was also happy to learn that I could use available Perl 5 modules that would let me try out Perl 6 features. Scott demonstrates the new features with code, and I could actually try it out myself as I followed along.

I'm sure there will be many, many Perl 6 books, but this was a nice place for me to start.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars look at the advanced features, April 4, 2005

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5 (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

Walters presents his book for Perl 5 programmers, who might be eyeing Perl 6 and wondering if they should migrate. So the chapters are designed with the new Perl 6 features explicitly demarcated and usually at the start of each chapter. The book emphasises what is different about Perl 6.

But it is also more than for Perl 5 readers. The book can be read as a complete explanatory text on Perl 6 OR Perl 5, for someone who has never programmed in any version of Perl. It shows that Perl 6 is in part a competitive response by the Perl community to the presence and influence of other languages. Overall, this evolutionary pressure benefits you, as a Perl programmer, by giving you a more powerful language.

For me, the most interesting section was at the end. There's a nifty discussion of possible set operations, implemented in a simple syntax. Plus other more abstract computer science topics. Try exercising your imagination by perusing these pages, even if you can't see an immediate need for them in your coding.

Also - it was good form for Walters, in an earlier review, to say that he wished he could've blogged without rating his own book.