use Perl

I was asked last night if I wanted to write an intro to Perl book. I don't know anything other than that - I asked for more details (publisher, etc), but more specifically: WHY?

There are a lot of great books out there already to introduce Perl to newbies, including the authoritative O'Reilly series.

One interesting spin could be a very low-level/lengthy introduction. Such as a dialogue on the difference between chop and chomp - the Camel book just hits the surface on that one.

And then there's version 6 coming out down the road, which I could also see explaining to newbies (this would be one of the advantages of the "syntactical sugar").

If it does come to be that I write a book, I have been thinking a lot about undertaking such a project. I don't know why - perhaps it's a genetic trait of a technical geek to leave something of him/herself behind for others to read and learn from. I've heard the horror stories - the massive amounts of time put into it and very little payback. But it's something that has fascinated me for a while.

Whatever ... I'm not going to get my hopes up. Color me cynical.

Jason