Today's Perl 5 barely resembles the first release of Perl 5 more than a decade ago. To keep pace with how it's being used, Perl has grown constantly, offering better, more powerful, cleaner ways to perform tasks, including taking the best ideas from newer object-oriented and functional languages. This same adaptation continues in the form of Perl 6.

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.

Using these new features, Perl 6 Now shows you how to write programs that are faster, are cleaner, have the ability to solve more difficult logic problems, and improve scalability and expressiveness. Changes to interpolation, variable references, and multithreading invocation, as well as the addition of set operations, lightweight arrays, autoboxing, strong type checking, and module precompilation, are just a sample of what you'll learn.

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. The programmer needs to adjust only a few habits, and this book will help you do that.

Perl 6's announcement shook the Perl universe, and you're invited to start taking advantage of all the hard work that's already been done. I'm confident you'll find these new tools as indispensable as I have.

• Basics, Data Flow, and Program Flow
  • The Programmer's Introduction to the Perl Computer
  • Perl 6 Road Map
  • Stricture by Default
• Variables, Arrays, and Control Structures
  • Text, Numbers, and Other Constant Data
  • Names, Containers, and Values
  • Operators
  • Multidimensional Arrays
  • Data Structures
  • Switch
  • Block Structure
  • Subroutines
• Threads and Objects
  • CPAN Modules
  • Objects
  • Exceptions
  • Type Safety
  • Multithreading
• Computer Science
  • Any and All
  • Lexical Closures
  • Continuations
  • Coroutines
• Appendix: Perl 5 vs. Perl 6 Operators