A tumbler is half empty or a tumbler is half filled is one and the same for me.. except that the perspectives differ..

In the mason template code that you have mentioned:

I still can see lot of Perl code in it, like:

$book->title, my @authors = $book->authors;

I look at <%perl>, <%... %> as special html tags...

(Ah! Perl is so intelligent that it recognizes Perl code present in HTML as well.. taking things this way one will see this as feature rather than as a thing that will confuse..)

I see that (from what you have said above) you aim is to learn "about Catalyst and MVC" and not to get lost in templating stuff..

It is better go through this recursion rather than staying away.. that adds up to ones experience.

All the very best.

20080109 Janitored by Corion: Removed PRE tags, added formatting, code tags, as per Writeup Formatting Tips