Perl 6 Now

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.