First Perl 6 Book is Out

prostoalex writes "O'Reilly Publishing presented Perl 6 Essentials, the first book to be dedicated to Perl 6, at the beginning of this month. Looking at the table of contents, it hardly looks like a valid replacement for Llama or Camel books. Chapter 1 is available online. The whole book is available to Safari subscribers." I'm sure we'll review it sooner or later.

Comments

Ummmmmmmmmm DUH!

[metalhed77]

Perl 6 aint even out yet. Of course its no camel yet. This is just for those people who HAVE to know what's going on in perl 6 dev.

not *intended* to replace the camel book

[josephgrossberg]

"it hardly looks like a valid replacement for Llama or Camel books"

It's not supposed to be. Just as they have conventions for the books' color (e.g. Perl blue), O'Reilly and Associates has conventions for the titles.

* "... Essentials" means an overview of what's new.
* "Learning ..." is a discussion and tutorial on a topic, intended for beginners
* "Programming ..." is the same, but for intermediate and advanced users
* "... Cookbook" is a series of problems and their solutions
* "... in a Nutshell" is like a language reference
* "...: The Definitive Guide" is a combination of all four
* "... Pocket Reference" is a shorter version of the above

Re:Ruby has its own design mistakes

[SewersOfRivendell]

I'd move to Ruby right now, except it doesn't support Unicode

That's not a "design mistake", it's just a major feature that hasn't been added yet. This will be remedied in a future version of Ruby.

A "design mistake" would be something error-prone and impossible to fix, like Python using indentation as part of the syntax.

Re:Ruby has its own design mistakes

[AceMarkE]

Actually, I believe that as long as all the lines at a given level are indented the same, the actual amount of indenting is irrelevant. Example:

for(1):
for(2): # indented two spaces
for(3): # indented five spaces
for(4): # same as for(2)
for(5): # note different than for(3)

The accepted standard is 4 spaces per indent. And really, most programmers tend to write something similar anyway, Python just forces you to at least make an attempt at making the code readable.

Mark Erikson

Chapter 3...

[sICE]

is there...

Re:Book deals too much with assembly

[chromatic]

OOP hasn't been decided yet. That's the next Apocalypse the design team is considering. Just about everything known about Perl syntax is in chapter 4.

There are also plenty of people who'll program Parrot or IMCC bytecodes. We're the people who are implementing Perl 6, Ruby, Python, Lua, BASIC, BF, Befunge, Scheme, Jako, Cola, Perl 5, and Perl 1 on Parrot.

If you're expecting this to be a new verison of the Camel or the Llama, you'll be disappointed. It's not. It's aimed at early adopters, people who are curious about the state of the project, and people who are interested in developing Perl 6, Parrot, or another language on top of Parrot.