I've been wanting to learn Perl for the past 2 years. I still don't have time, but in 5-6 months I'll be able to finish what I'm doing and start Perl (as a hobby, not a full-time endeavor!).
Some languages have a "magic" book or article, that you'll never learn anything deeply before reading it. For me and JavaScript, it was Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts". It literally opened my mind when I read it last week and my Node.js code (which is in CoffeeScript BTW) would never be the same (hopefully it'll be an order of magnitude better).
Is there a magic book on Perl? And is there any point starting with Perl 6 (considering I don't want to write mission critical programs with Perl just yet, and don't mind to be an early adopter at all if the product will see the light of the day in the next 2-3 years)?
My weird suggestion: start at the beginning of Perl's great 5.x renaissance, Perl 5.6. Any book that explains that version's features, learn all of it. You will learn probably the most comprehensibly compatible version of the language you'll ever need, and you'll strengthen your basics before learning all the new goodies introduced in later Perls.
I'm the type of person that wants to write Perl once and use it almost anywhere. Lots of useful language features in later versions simply aren't supported on systems that didn't upgrade their stock Perl version (for example, Centos 5 ships with I think Perl 5.8.x, and the current stable is 5.16.x).
And if you're thinking "Oh, i'll just upgrade perl on that five year old legacy server," kill yourself now and spare the agony.
And as you already have an ePub version, I would like to suggest selling it (or giving it away free, as you already do) in the iBookStore as well. iPad is an amazing device for reading technical books, and I spend few hours every day reading ePub books in iBooks.app (I read Crockford's book and 3 other O'Reilly books just in the past 2 months).
Right now there are many Perl books in the iBookStore, but they're mostly cookbooks (step-by-step tutorial), not a no-bullshit introduction to the language as your book is! I'm sure many many more would discover or benefit from your book if it was available there as well :)
Some languages have a "magic" book or article, that you'll never learn anything deeply before reading it. For me and JavaScript, it was Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts". It literally opened my mind when I read it last week and my Node.js code (which is in CoffeeScript BTW) would never be the same (hopefully it'll be an order of magnitude better).
Is there a magic book on Perl? And is there any point starting with Perl 6 (considering I don't want to write mission critical programs with Perl just yet, and don't mind to be an early adopter at all if the product will see the light of the day in the next 2-3 years)?
Thanks a lot.