Though it pains me somewhat to say it, I cannot recommend this book.
Let me first emphasise that it’s not that there’s probably not a lot of good information in it–there is. I have continually stumbled across interesting tidbits about how Perl 6 will do things.
The problem is with that verb: *stumbled*. The book eschews a reference-book sort of setup, and in its own words:
bq. […] I wrote this book in the style of a plain programming-language manual with basic concepts coming first and later chapters building on them.
But if the point of the book is to show moderately-proficient Perl 5 programmers how to do things in idiomatic Perl 6, I don’t believe you need that build-up. And even if you do think it’s appropriate, consider that on that same page (xxix) there is a diagram of how the chapters relate to one another, and _it’s not anywhere near a straight line_.
So, I find myself wondering why the author made the choice to impose what seems an inappropriate structure on the material.
And then there’s a lot of material that seems to be either filler or just out of place. For instance, Chapter 7 runs from page 105 to page 127. Of this, 3/4 of page 106 covers Perl 6, while all the rest is about using PDL with Perl 5. That’s not what I wanted from this book.
As I said before, I’m sure there’s a lot of good stuff buried in this book, but it’s been a disappointing slog to find it. I couldn’t recommend this to anyone.
