Preface

Perl 6 is a new programming language in the Perl family. It has come a long way from the start of its development in 2000 to the current state, when the language is production ready.

Although the initial project of the language was a next version of Perl 5 to trim some edges, get rid of legacy, and add features that were requested by the community, it instead turned out to be a shiny language that holds the spirit of Perl, offers us a variety of modern mechanisms, and allows you to follow paradigms such as functional and reactive programming.

The great thing about today’s Perl 6 is that all these new things are already built into the language and no external libraries are needed to start working with them. For example, take one of the most difficult topics: concurrent and parallel programming. Perl 6 has support for it so that the programmer can start using it right away without thinking about how to organize spawning new threads or implement inter-process communication and access shared data.

One of the goals that we had while writing this book was to show that Perl 6 is a great tool you can consider for your daily practice.

This book contains 15 chapters that cover everything from the basics to more complex themes such as functional programming.