By Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski, Leopold Tötsch

In three concise parts this book tells about the design philosophy behind Perl 6 and Parrot, provides an overview of Perl 6 and an overview of Parrot. It's aimed mostly at people who just can't wait for Perl 6 and want to get updated with the latest developments.

It's good to have an overview of all the features of Perl 6 in one place... Perl 6 seems really *big*, I'd say. It looks like it was packed with every programming technique / paradigm out there. Just the amount of keywords is staggering in will take time to memorize :-)

The book also contains a detailed overview of Parrot and its building blocks - PASM, PIR, IMCC. This part is mostly of interest to people involved in Parrot development or in development of compilers from Perl 5/6 / Ruby / Python / Others to Parrot.

Parrot looks very promising. I was surprised at the authors' comment that at the moment there are almost no optimizations implemented in the Perl interpreter. If this is indeed so, Parrot compilation will provide Perl with a long-needed speed-boost.