Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated With Perl 5

Descriptions:

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 adopter’s guide will help you do these things.

Part 1 – Basics, Data Flow, and Program Flow
Chapter 1 – The Programmer’s Introduction to the Perl Computer
Chapter 2 – Perl 6 Road Map
Chapter 3 – Stricture by Default

Part 2 – Variables, Arrays, and Control Structures
Chapter 4 – Text, Numbers, and Other Constant Data
Chapter 5 – Names, Containers, and Values
Chapter 6 – Operators
Chapter 7 – Multidimensional Arrays
Chapter 8 – Data Structures
Chapter 9 – Switch
Chapter 10 – Block Structure
Chapter 11 – Subroutines

Part 3 – Threads and Objects
Chapter 12 – CPAN Modules
Chapter 14 – Objects
Chapter 15 – Exceptions
Chapter 16 – Type Safety
Chapter 17 – Multithreading

Part 4 – Computer Science
Chapter 18 – Any and All
Chapter 19 – Lexical Closures
Chapter 20 – Continuations
Chapter 21 – Coroutines
Appendix – Perl 5 vs. Perl 6 Operators