Excellent!

Although the Apocolypses and corresponding Exegesis are excellent, I am EAGERLY anticipating an entire book devoted to Perl6. Will it be the next edition of the Camel?

Though I expect that the next edition of the Camel will be devoted to Perl 6, I have not been invited to contribute to that. I had rather thought I would write a Making-the-Transition-from-Perl-5-to-Perl-6 book.

Or possibly "OO Perl 6" with a vastly expanded Chapter 2. ;-)

To be honest, this sounds like the kind of book I'd not want, precisely because it's trying to do two very different things at once.

If a person is learning about Perl for the first time, then there's no reason to use the transition from 5 to 6 as a background. They don't know 5, and trying to teach two variations of a language at once is dubious pedagogy to be sure.

On the other hand, if someone knows Perl 5, but isn't willing to go out and learn about 6, then probably they've already made up their minds that Perl isn't for them. After all, Perl 6 isn't that big a change -- it's not like it's going to wake up one morning and realize that it's C++.

I've been using a humble 31-page booklet by John Vromans of the Squirrel Consultancy on Perl 5 for quite some time (is this the pocket reference you're talking about?). And personally I like the two extremes: a resource that's quick and to the point, and a set of resources that go deep, like the Camel and our Monastery.

It's really only trying to do one thing: get people excited about Perl 6. I envisioned the book attacking the problem from two directions, but that's a matter of methodology. I agree that it would probably be a lower percentage of people who learn Perl for the first time from such a book. That's what llama and camel are for, and they do a great job of it.

By your logic, it sounds like there's no reason to try and persuade anyone that Perl 6 is a good thing, they'll either like it or not. I don't agree with that at all. A good number of people don't like it purely because they don't understand it. The changes scare them, threaten their comfortable feeling of knowing Perl. They ask "Does it really make the easy things easy anymore?" The answer is "Yes." It still does, a little differently, but nothing to be scared of. These people (and there are a number of them) could be won over relatively easily.

I look forward to reading and giving my students the book that TheDamian writes.

P.S. I meant the O'Reilly "Perl 5 Pocket Reference".

A good number of people don't like it purely because they don't understand it. The changes scare them, threaten their comfortable feeling of knowing Perl.

/callousness/ People that can't handle change really oughtn't be in the software industry. I spent a great many hours studying CORBA only to find it vanishing. I don't want to learn .NET (or Mono), but by god I'm gonna have to. /\callousness/

Having said that, perhaps a good question here is whether the target audience is people who are relunctant to explore new technologies in general (in which case goto(/callousness/)), or people that are entertaining other options in lieu of Perl 6, i.e., Python, Ruby. If it's the former, this book is a hand-holding reference*; if the latter, then this is really an evangelical text that ought to be written in a manner suitable for "backsliding" programmers as well as project managers and PHB's.

In short, I still think this book needs to do one thing well, not try to appeal to two different audiences simultaneously.

* Errm, a reference that holds your hand...not, oh nevermind