One question we occasionally get on the phenomenal #perl6 IRC channel is about Perl 6 books. It turns out, some folks don’t want to learn just from tutorials, blog posts and docs. Last year, we didn’t have any good answers to that question.

A few months ago, there seemed to be a flurry of such questions, and at the same time, rumours about new book projects started to spread.

If I remember correctly, the first rumour was when Laurent Rosenfeld contacted me in June, asking for feedback on a manuscript. He had translated a good 200 pages of the Think Python book to Perl 6. This is primarily a book teaching programming to beginners. Later I was happy to hear that a major publisher has accepted the manuscript. The manuscript is now finished, and under review. So I guess we’ll see e-book and print versions of this book in due time.

Then brian d foy opened a kickstarter to raise funds for a “Learning Perl 6” book. By the time this is published, the kickstarter project should still be open, so I warmly encourage you to support this. Having a book by a prominent member of the Perl 5 community, and author of several good Perl books would surely be a boon for the Perl 6 community.

Before the publication of brian’s project, I’ve been mulling about writing my own Perl 6 book. In the past, I’ve tried that once already, and failed. But I had more success with another book project of mine, so I decided to give it another shot. The working title is Perl 6 by example. Content for the book is published in form of blog posts, and later turned into book chapters.

Later I learned that Ken Youens-Clark had written a book on metagenomics that spends about 150 pages explaining Perl 6. And it’s free, you can download the PDF, epub and mobi versions right away! If you’ve followed the advent calendar, you might have read Ken’s earlier post on Bioinformatics

In summary, we have one book starring Perl 6 content, one in progress with the manuscript in stage “feature complete”, one in the kick-starting phase which you can support, and a fourth being written right now, with parts being pre-published in the form of blog posts.

If you want to keep up-to-date with news on Perl 6 books, you can sign up for the low volume Perl 6 book mailing list (less than one mail per month).

I hope that in next year’s advent calendar, we’ll see four reviews of Perl 6 books.