Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, Second Edition

Rating:
Summary: Serious Perl programmers only
Review: As you can imagine, this short book is only for the serious Perl guru. The first half of the book is on the Perl 6 language and is so terse that it's only readable by experienced Perl programmers. The second half of the book covers Parrot, the new Perl Virtual Machine. This is seriously hard core material, which is useful if you plan to write your own compiler to fit on top of the machine.

Doubtless this is some cutting edge and impressive material, but the book has no ramp for beginners. If your job depends on high-end Perl, you will want to read this book. If you are an average Perl user you can probably wait for the next version of Programming Perl.

Rating:
Summary: Good reading in many ways for many users
Review: I found this book well written and enjoyable. As someone interested in how a team goes about developing a new language, parts of it read like a good NY Times feature. For anyone writing Perl professionally, this is a good heads-up on where their language is going. For introductory Perl users, esp those coming from another language, the Design Philosophy and quick language review sections are very useful for 'grokking' Perl at a high level and then seeing how the pieces fall into place.

Rating:
Summary: Parrot ~ .NET ?!
Review: Perl 5 is the current version of Perl out there in active use. But a cadre of key developers has been steadily tooling up a major upgrade, Perl 6. This book gives you a detailed preview that claims to be an accurate description of what it will be, when it is officially released. In part, of course, so that existing Perl users can plan for the future. But the book is also a call to arms. If you are enticed and intrigued by Perl 6, and would like to contribute to its development, then please do so! The authors show how to join the development team. An all-volunteer effort, mind you. They can't pay you anything.

Speaking of which, that brings up the second part of the book. As part of the Perl 6 effort, there is a related project, Parrot. It will be a language independent virtual machine that can convert Perl 6 source to a byte code binary. And also do likewise for Tcl, Python, Java and other languages.

Does this ring any bells? Sounds in the spirit of Microsoft's .NET. That was and is a massive task in design and implementation. No one outside Microsoft, and precious few inside, knows how much it is costing. What is impressive is that here in Parrot, we have a bunch of volunteers trying a similar effort, with no $budget to speak of. Can they do it? The authors strongly argue, "yes".