> One thing I have grown to appreciate about Perl is its mentality of helping you getting the job done no matter what. It is incredibly effective at helping pr

> One thing I have grown to appreciate about Perl is its mentality of helping you getting the job done no matter what. It is incredibly effective at helping prototyping rapidly small ideas. > the Perl community is awesome, there are so many friendly and helpful people around willing to share insights, code, and words of encouragement. And CPAN helps a lot too! It can be considered as an important part of what makes this community so special, it is a very serious repository of modules, I mean not only code: it is incredibly usable, with lots of documentation and a crazy test infrastructure (http://www.cpantesters.org/ http://www.cpantesters.org/) that helps to build quality distributions. The good thing with the Modern Perl book is that, before explaining the language itself, it explains the Perl philosophy. And then it explains about the community and the CPAN. Being modern is also about not writing code and re-using long-tested modules from CPAN with cleans APIs: it helps to compose quality code and make maintenance easier.