We want a Perl 6 book. We want it badly enough to write it ourselves. So that's what we're doing: writing one.

We, that is Patrick Michaud (architect of the Rakudo Perl compiler), Jonathan Worthington (prolific contributor to both Rakudo and Parrot), Carl Mäsak (frenetic Rakudo user, and our number one bug finder) and Moritz Lenz (keeper of the Perl 6 test suite, and Perl 6 user and blogger). We are also open to contribution from others - already Jonathan Scott Duff has written an initial preface for us.

We don't have a name yet for our book. We want to cover the basics of Perl 6, enough to get your feet wet, and enough to make you want to use it. We want it to be based on useful examples. It is not going to be the definitive book, that task we leave to Larry Wall and Damian Conway.

Our vision is to present primarily the subset of Perl 6 that Rakudo understands, and have printed copies available by the time Rakudo Star is released, that is April or May 2010. chromatic and Allison Randal have kindly offered to published it via Onyx Neon Press.

Until then, monthly releases will be published under a Creative Commons license (noncommercial, attribution, share-alike).

Currently we have four chapters under construction, and the intention of writing the more introductory chapters later, when we know what we need to introduce for the later chapters. So far we have

• Multi dispatch
• Classes and Object
• Regexes
• Grammars

You can download the preliminary PDF version of the book here.

Interested? Check out the git repository, and join us in irc://freenode.net#perl6book.